ABSTRACT
In the late nineteenth century the science of psychology (general psychology) was established as a laboratory science, and the research focused on identifying basic processes and associated general laws of learning and memory (Ebbinghaus, 1885/1913) that would mediate all types of cognitive activity. During this pioneering time scientists made a fundamental distinction between attention/awareness (primary memory) and long-term memory (secondary memory) based on their introspective salience (James, 1890). Because the introspective method was eventually unable to resolve scientific issues in the early twentieth century (Ericsson & Simon, 1993), researchers turned away from complex mental mechanisms toward behavior and observable associations between stimuli and responses (Watson, 1913). In the pioneering research on telegraphers, Bryan and Harter (1899) had shown that many skills, such as sending and receiving Morse code, were gradually acquired during extended periods of training and thus were very complex and mediated by a massive number of acquired domain-specific associations. Because the same processes were thought to mediate the full range of behavior, it was, therefore, reasonable to turn away from the study of complex skills and study simple paired-associate learning in the laboratory, where the complete process of learning associations between unfamiliar items, such as nonsense syllables, could be studied within an hour-long session. Although there were a small number of researchers who continued to study complex skills it was not until the 1950s that a large number of American psychologists became interested in research on more complex cognitive processes.
