ABSTRACT
The fundamental assumption of cognitive psy chology is that the mind is a representational sys tem which mediates between sensory inputs and behavioral outputs. The primary task for the cognitive psychologist is one of explaining how the various cognitive capacities operate by refer ence to the structure of the salient parts of this representational system. The explanations offered are both functional and decompositional: they decompose the relevant capacities into their basic representational components and show how those components function together to produce the capacities. Theories are evaluated by how well they account for the behavior observed in psy chological experiments and, at the lowest level, by how well they fit with knowledge gleaned from neurophysiology about the physical bases of the capacities.
