A heightened interest in cognitive psychology for questions about the awareness and conscious control people may have of their own cognitive functioning is becoming more and more apparent, problems which, for many decades, cognitive psychologists gave no attention to or simply enclosed in parentheses. In the first part of this paper, an attempt will be made to present an integrated view of the contributions made by various sections within cognitive psychology, in which such renewed and growing concern with problems of consciousness manifests itself with increasing force. This attempt at integration includes various theoretical positions derived from quite different epistemological traditions (developmental cognitive psychology, information processing, cognitive-behavioral, and cognitive social psychology), but which have as their common denominator that they all seek to elucidate the capacity present in humans to regulate the nature of their own mental functioning and the development of their cognitive acquisitions. The second part of this paper will point out the implications, resulting from these new concerns evident in present-day cognitive psychology, for the still poorly understood relationship between cognition and behavior. It attempts to show, by considering in turn the cognitive and the behavioral aspects of this relationship, how one might hope to finally bridge the gap separating cognition from behavior.

87This study investigated causal and moral reasoning in children 5, 7, 9, and 11 years old. The first of two experiments looked at judgements of causality, responsibility, and punishment as a function of necessary or non-necessary conditions. Children of all ages made use of necessity information in their causal attributions and, to a lesser extent, in their moral attributions. The second of the two experiments investigated excusing conditions in regard to the same three dependent variables. The mitigating factors of voluntariness and foreseeability were manipulated using the same stories (in necessary condition) from Expt 1. All children except the five-year-olds made consistent use of the voluntariness information in their causal and moral reasoning. This factor showed significantly increased usage with age. Foreseeability was used in a consistent manner only by seven-year-olds; children both younger and older tended to ignore this variable as a mitigating factor. The results of both experiments are discussed in comparison with analogous work done with college students.

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Questions about the nature of social-cognitive skills and their relationship to social behaviour are probably among the most important issues which have been raised by recent research on the development of social competence. In this paper, I first attempt to describe the research context in which the question of the relationship between cognition and behaviour has arisen with particular acuity within the field of social-cognitive development. Following a selective review of some of the studies emanating from this author's research program, concerning the specific issue of the relations between the level of social cognition in the child and the adequacy of the child's social interactions in a naturalistic setting, the potential flaws and limits of our original ways of measuring and conceptualizing these relations are examined. Finally, a sketch of the conditions that need to be considered for specific types of social behaviour to be regulated by particular aspects of cognition is presented.