ABSTRACT
The two fields drifted more and more apart, and while the first was developing increasingly more sophisticated models of the mind “software”, the second gravitated more and more toward the physiological “hardware”, as testified, for example, by the distribution of articles appearing in the Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology. The repeal of the atomistic assumption is at the core of the “cognitive revolution”. With it there came about a return to structural conceptions. Cognitive capacities are best viewed as integrated structures, that is to say, they cannot be reduced to the simple summation of independent atomic constituents. No wonder that when the study of human cognition was put back on its feet, in the sixties, the comparative approach, turned into the study of animal learning behavior, had very little to say.
