ABSTRACT
Almost from the inception of the effort to develop information processing models of cognition investigators have argued that at some point there would be important links between the study of elementary mental operations crucial to the performance of complex tasks (Chase, 1978) and the brain systems that support such operations. This view is clearly outlined by Herbert Simon in his important Compton Lectures (Simon, 1981) as follows:
It is the theme of this chapter that the time has arrived for the development of the detailed analysis of the physiology of human cognition. For the last 15 years, a number of separate biological fields have coalesced under
the name of "neuroscience." Neuroscience is concerned with the basic principles of organization of nervous systems. Although the field has, from its start, included studies of normal and pathological human brains, the bulk of the work has concerned animal models, and in particular, synaptic and intracellular phenomena. Except for occasional interest in language and its pathology, neuroscientists rarely choose human organisms as the object of study. In part, this arises because of the complexity of human functioning and also because of the difficulty, until recent methodological developments, in doing experimental physiology with human beings.
