Personality functioning and cognitive psychology.

This article is based on a symposium on Cognitive Theory and Personality Functioning. As distinguished from the S-R type of system, cognitive theory assumes that the organism is in commerce with its environment through the medium of selective representation. This means that the responses of the organism are not determined directly by proximal stimuli or by specific receptor-effector connections. Rather it is assumed that there is interposed a central process which represents features of the environment through phenomenal organization. This article provides two main propositions to supplement this symposium. The first is that personality functioning may be better understood in terms of cognitive theory, if there is a genetic theory of cognition for human learning development. The second is that an analysis of the cognitive and motivational conditions for incidental memory may also prove profitable for an understanding of the development of personality functioning. The possible role of figure-ground organization in this incidental learning has been indicated. And as a further hypothesis it has been suggested that there may be an important relationship between incidental learning and so-called "generalization." Neither of these propositions has been stated in operational terms.