ABSTRACT
One of the premises of contemporary cognitive science is that an organism’s response to a stimulus requires sensory, perceptual, and memory processes on an order of complexity unexpected from observations of simple reactions to physical stimulation. It was a touchstone of the cognitive revolution in the late 1950s and early 1960s that these interpretative processes are a proper subject for psychology, setting the goal of explaining how a stimulus is processed through successive mental transformations. In contrast, within behaviourist conceptions that regarded the relationships between stimuli and responses as little more than learned reflexes (Skinner, 1953; Watson, 1913), the role that mental transformations played was on a par with the hyphen in the term stimulus–response (S–R) psychology.
