Cognitive science-based principles for the design and delivery of training

Cognition is defined by Ulric Neisser (1976) as the “activity of knowing: the acquisition, organization, and use of knowledge” (p. 1). This is just one of many definitions, most of which implicate the products or processes of thought. Although cognition has been a topic of broad interest since the time of Plato and Aristotle (Herrmann & Chaffin, 1988), the current cognitive paradigm dates back to the mid-20th century and the confluence of several pivotal ideas, chief of which was the computer metaphor of thought or information processing. There was also a simultaneous realization that the current behaviorist paradigm was limited in several ways. George Miller (2003) dated the conception of the cognitive revolution in psychology back to September 11, 1956, a day on which several seminal talks on information theory were given at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since then, the paradigm has been influenced by numerous disciplines, including psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and computer science.