ABSTRACT
Success in school or in the work place requires the use of human resources that contribute to the attainment of goals that persons set for themselves on the task. According to an old tradition in European thinking, the human mind has been viewed as a system composed of a variety of processes, each structurally related to the other but performing separate and distinct functions. In the flow of scientific history this componential theory of the mind has received considerable support, especially from neuroscience (Coltheart, 1985; Kinsboume & Hicks, 1978). More recently, this viewpoint has become prominent in cognitive psychology and has led to the development of theories of mental functions in which a number of systems are assumed to underlie performance in a particular domain. During task performance, such functional units are supposed to be involved in analyzing task-relevant information and comparing it to memory contents. These units are used to search for action strategies appropriate for mastering the task and for choosing and executing actions according to the demands set by the task goals (see Hacker, 1983; Tulving, 1985; Wickens, 1984).
