Content area
Full Text
Cognitive Planning: The Psychological Basis of Intelligent Behavior By J. P. Das, Binod C. Kar, and Rauno K. Parrila. New Delhi: Sage, 1996. 184 pp. Cloth, $29.95.
Cognitive psychology needs a theory that is grand enough to encompass its disparate subfields and diverse findings. PASS theory, proposed by J. P. Das, Binod Kar, and Rauno Parrila, is a commendable attempt at this sort of synthesizing and meaning-making theory, but despite some interesting and novel insights from both the Western and Eastern traditions, it cannot fill this serious gap in our discipline.
PASS is an acronym for planning arousal/attention, simultaneous, and successive-key concepts in this unusual definition of intelligence. It is a theory that places planning at the heart of cognition. According to the authors, a plan is the basis of goal-oriented behavior, the essence of intelligence. In their taxonomy, planning is similar to problem solving, but not identical. Unfortunately, the ways in which these two concepts differ is never made clear. Plans are hierarchical to strategies or tactics, but the boundaries of these concepts are also unclear. A major flaw of Cognitive Planning that is repeated in several key sections is the use of vague constructs, which seem to overlap and then become differentiated in ways that obscure their intended meaning. A primary tenet of PASS theory is the identification of parallel relationships between neuroanatomical and functional aspects of the brain, although the reason why this linkage is useful or necessary to PASS theory is never articulated in a convincing way. Das, Kar, and Parrila argue that there must be a logical relationship between the neural structures that undergird planning (i.e., intelligent thought) and the process of planning. By identifying the regions of the brain that are involved in information processing, we should gain a better understanding of neuropsychology or information processing or both. This is an intuitive line of reasoning, but empirical evidence for the idea that mutually supportive theories would prove beneficial in some way is never provided.
There have been impressive advances in our understanding of brain functioning in recent years, with much of...