Actively Learning To Use a Word Processor

In the early days of cognitive psychology, it was often necessary to rail against “stimulus-response” analyses of learning that went like this: Items in the world come around and get paired with responses (or dispositions to respond) in the organism (generally because the pairing leads to a good effect of some sort). This is a somewhat barren analysis of human learning, and cognitive psychology succeeded in doing away with it. The solution offered by cognitive psychology, then and now is to turn the question of learning into the question of memory. This was probably a good idea; after all, successful learning ought to lead to memory, and stimulus-response psychology had nothing to say about how even simple aspects of memory organization could be explained.