Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 May 2010
INTRODUCTION: REPRESENTATION AND PROCESS IN HIGHER LEVEL COGNITION
Decrements in higher level cognitive abilities are a prevalent feature of dementia associated with psychiatric illnesses, such as schizophrenia and major depression; degenerative neurological disorders, such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease; and the normal aging process. The kinds of cognitive deficits that are typically associated with these conditions are fairly well characterized through the wealth of neuropsychological studies dealing with each. However, the task of establishing the link between particular forms of pathophysiology associated with each condition and specific cognitive impairments has proved more difficult. A satisfactory resolution of this issue depends, to a large extent, on the ability to describe what individuals can and cannot do cognitively – what kinds of percepts and concepts they can and cannot represent. I will argue that psychological studies of reasoning have attempted to characterize information processing limitations in two ways: (a) by describing the nature and complexity of percepts and concepts manipulated in reasoning, and (b) by specifying their reliance on working memory, which involves the ability to temporarily store and manipulate pieces of information.
The former approach, I contend, has been used to show that differences in reasoning abilities across cognitive developmental stages or phylogeny, as well as reasoning impairments resulting from brain damage in humans, might be explained by the presence or absence of the ability to represent knowledge structures of a given complexity.
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