ABSTRACT
Much commerce with the environment involves dealing with classes of things rather than with unique events and objects. Indeed, the case can be made that all cognitive activity depends upon a prior placing of events in terms of their category membership. Developmental studies, studies of the effect of different experiential histories, investigations of cognitive and other pathologies—these will be the research tools required for the more basic job of investigating the origins of strategies. Concept attainment is, to be sure, an aspect of what is conventionally called thinking, and in this sense the title justifies itself. But have also urged a broader view: that virtually all cognitive activity involves and is dependent on the process of categorizing. Given a limitation on the number of decisions that a person may make prior to concept attainment it has the property of increasing the chances of attainment over the poorer chances involved in conservative focusing.
