Four issues are discussed: (1) differences between cognition and emotion; (2) affect, emotion, and motivation differentials, including a neuropsychological model of motivation; (3) mental attention (working memory) as a resource neither affective nor cognitive, but applicable to both; and (4) explication of neuropsychological scheme units, which have neuronal circuits as functional infrastructure, thus helping to clarify the semantics of functional connectivity.

We question memory reconsolidation and emotional arousal as sufficient determinants of therapeutic change. Generating new feelings and meanings must be contrasted with activating and stabilizing the evolving memories that reflect those novel experiences. Some therapeutic changes are not attributable to a memory model alone. “Emotional processing” is also needed and is often an undeclared form of complex executive problem solving.

Working memory (WM) and inhibitory control (IC) are general-purpose resources that guide cognition and behavior. In this study, the developmental relations between WM and IC were investigated in 96 typically developing children aged 6 to 17 years in an experimental task paradigm using an efficiency metric that combined speed and accuracy performance. The ability to activate and process information in WM showed protracted age-related growth. Performance involving WM and IC together was empirically distinguishable from that involving WM alone. The results indicate that developmental improvements in WM are attributable to increased processing efficiency in activation, suppression, and strategic resource deployment, and that WM and IC are best studied in novel, complex situations that elicit competition among those resources (JINS, 2007, 13, 59–67.)

Using neoPiagetian theory of mental attention (or working memory), I task-analyze two complex performances of great apes and one symbolic performance (funeral burials) of early Homo sapiens. Relating results to brain size growth data, I derive estimates of mental attention for great apes, Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and modern Homo sapiens, and use children's cognitive development as reference. This heuristic model seems consistent with research.

Does Lewis imply that brain processes might be used to replace an as-yet-unavailable substantive organismic neuropsychology? To counteract this reductionist idea I argue for distinguishing between affects and emotions, and discuss a real-life example of implicit emotional appraisal. Failure to use organismic units of processing such as schemes or schemas makes the bridging attempt fall under a reductionist “mereological fallacy.”

The authors' results support a functionalist conception of working memory: a manifold repertoire of schemes/schemas (long-term memory) and a small set of general-purpose “hidden operators.” Using some of these operators I define mental (i.e., endogenous) attention. Then, analyzing two of the authors' unexplained important findings, I illustrate the mental-attention model's explanatory power. Multivariate methodology that varies developmental, task differences, and individual differences is recommended.

Cowan fails to obtain a magical number of 7 because his analysis is faulty. This is revealed by an alternative analysis of Cowan's own tasks. The analysis assumes a number 7 for adults, and neoPiagetian mental- capacity values for children. Data patterns and proportions of success (reported in Cowan's Figs. 2 and 3) are thus quantitatively explained in detail for the first time.

Two assertions of Halford et al. are critiqued: their claim of priority in relational complexity analysis and the sufficiency for cognitive development of their relational-complexity analysis of tasks. Critical discussion of concrete task analyses (i.e., the relational complexity of proportionality problems, of balance scale problems, and the Tower of Hanoi) serves, by way of counterexamples, to highlight problems in their method.