ABSTRACT
If periods in the history of psychology were named as are periods in the history of art, the last 20 years or so would be termed the “abstractionist” period. During that period, cognitive psychologists have attempted to invent abstract representations that capture the essence of different classes of events. Those abstract representations are given psychological reality in that they are said to be used in an invariant fashion across a wide range of situations to identify and respond to members of the abstract class or category. For example, it might be claimed that a situation is classified and responded to in terms of some schema that has been abstracted across experience in situations that are similar to a present one (e.g., Hastie, 1981). The abstractionist approach is very well suited to explain stability in performance across situations. Indeed, the focus is on similarities among situations (defined in terms of shared attributes or characteristics) and the use of those similarities to create an abstract representation of some general class or category. The prediction is that performance will be stable across situations that are members of the same general class.
