Knowledge Acquired from Learning: Procedural Cognition and its Declarative Cognizance

Abstract

62 college students articulated the procedural cognition acquired during successful learning of both original and reversal-shifts of the discrimination-reversal learning task. Articulations formed a four-level hierarchy of “declarative cognizance” (defined as correct articulation of reinforcement contingencies) as follows: Level 1 having no declarative cognizance, Level 2 of perceptually based cognizance, Level 3 of concrete-rule-based cognizance, and Level 4 of abstract-rule-based cognizance. The plausibility of this cognitive hierarchy is enhanced by observations that increasingly higher levels of declarative cognizance are associated with increasingly faster learning. Mon-tare's 1983 and 1988 concepts of primary and secondary signalization are invoked to account for the learning processes underlying these examples of procedural cognition and the hierarchy of declarative cognizance.