ABSTRACT
In the early years of the last century, psychology was regarded as comprising three related fields: cognitive, orectic (concerned with the emotions), and conative (concerned with the will). During the second half of the century, experimental research was increasingly dominated by cognitive psychology, influenced by the computer metaphor. Computers have provided a valuable model for understanding the processes and mechanisms involved in such cognitive capacities as perception, attention, and memory but, perhaps unsurprisingly, have so far proved less fruitful as analogies of emotion and the will. Consequently, while cognitive psychologists have become increasingly knowledgeable about how the brain processes information, we have made much less progress on the question of why the organism does one thing rather than another or indeed why it does anything at all.
