  The ontological and methodological commitments of traditional computational cognitive science, which have been in play since at least the mid-Twentieth Century, are by now well understood. Early or influential applications of computationalism to cognition include theories of language acquisition (Chomsky 1959), attention (Broadbent 1958), problem solving (Newell, Shaw, and Simon 1958), attention, memory (Sternberg 1969), and perception (Marr 1982). Common to all computationally-oriented research is the idea that cognition involves a step-wise series of events, beginning with the transduction of stimulus energy into a symbolic expression, followed by transformations of this expression according to various rules, the result of which is a particular output—a grammatical linguistic utterance, isolation of one stream of words from another, a solution to a logic problem, the identification of a stimulus as being among a set of memorized stimuli, or a 3-D perception of the world