Those identified with the cognitive viewpoint argue that learning, particularly in humans, cannot be satisfactory explained in terms of stimulus-response associations. They propose that the learner forms a cognitive structure in memory, which preserves and organizes information about the various events that occur in a learning situation.
When a test is made to determine how much has been learned, the subject music encodes the test stimulus and scan it against his memory to determine an appropriate action. What is done will depend upon the cognitive structure retrieved from memory, and the context in which the test occurs. Thus the subject’s response is a decision process that varies with the nature of the test situation and the subject’s memory for prior events.