THIS PAPER is concerned with the nature of the tutorial process; the means whereby an adult or "expert" helps somebody who is less adult or less expert. Though its aim is general, it is expressed in terms of a particular task: a tutor seeks to teach children aged 3, 4 and 5 yr to build a particular three-dimensional structure that requires a degree of skill that is initially beyond them. It is the usual type of tutoring situation in which one member "knows the answer" and the other does not, rather like a "practical" in which only the instructor "knows how". The changing interaction of tutor and children provide our data.A great deal of early problem solving by the developing child is of this order. Although from the earliest months of life he is a "natural" problem solver in his own right (e.g. Bruner, 1973) it is often the ease that his efforts are assisted and fostered by others who are more skilful than he is (Kaye, 1970). Whether he is learning the procedures that constitute the skills of attending, communicating, manipulating objects, locomoting, or, indeed, a more effective problem solving procedure itself, there are usually others in attendance who help him on his way. Tutorial interactions are, in short, a crucial feature of infancy and childhood. Our species, moreover, appears to be the only one in which any "intentional" tutoring goes on (Bruner, 1972;Hinde, 1971). For although it is true that many of the higher primate species learn by observation of their elders (Hamburg, 1968; van Lawick-Goodall, 1968), there is no evidence that those elders do anything to instruct their charges in the performance of the skill in question. What distinguishes man as a species is not only his capacity for learning, but for teaching as well. It is the main aim of this paper to examine some of the major implications of this interactive, instructional relationship between the developing child and his elders for the study of skill acquisition and problem solving.The acquisition of skill in the human child can be fruitfully conceived as a hierarchical program in which component skills are combined into "higher skills" by appropriate orchestration to meet new, more complex task requirements (Bruner, 1973). The process is analogous to problem solving in which mastery of "lower order" or constituent problems in a sine qua non for success with a larger jjroblcm, each level influencing the other-as with reading where the deciphering of words makes possible the deciphering of sentences, and sentences then aid in the deciphering of particular words (F. Smith, 1971). Given persistent intention in the young learner, given a "lexicon" of constituent skills, the crucial task is often one of com-

Surely since the Enlightenment, if not before, the study of mind has centered principally on how man achieves a "true" knowledge of the world. Emphasis in this pursuit has varied, of course: empiricists have concentrated on the mind's interplay with an external world of nature, hoping to find the key in the association of sensations and ideas, while rationalists have looked inward to the powers of mind itself for the principles of right reason. The objective, in either case, has been to discover how we achieve "reality," that is to say, how we get a reliable fix on the world, a world that is, as it were, assumed to be immutable and, as it were, "there to be observed." This quest has, of course, had a profound effect on the development of psychology, and the empiricist and rationalist traditions have dominated our conceptions of how the mind grows and how it gets its grasp on the "real world." Indeed, at midcentury Gestalt theory represented the rationalist wing of this enterprise and American learning theory the empiricist. Both gave accounts of mental development as proceeding in some more or less linear and uniform fashion from an initial incompetence in grasping reality to a final competence, in one case attributing it to the working out of internal processes or mental organization, and in the other to some unspecified principle of reflection by which-whether through reinforcement, association, or conditioning-we came to respond to the world "as it is." There have always been dissidents who

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About ten years ago I was party to the publication of an innocent enough paper entitled "Value and Need as Organizing Factors in Perception." It was concerned with what at that time was the rather obscure problem of how extrastimulus factors influenced perception, a subject then of interest to only a small band of us-Gardner Murphy, Nevitt Sanford, Muzafer Sherif, and a few others. Obviously, Professor Boring is quite right about the mischievousness of the Zeitgeist, for the appearance of this paper seemed to coincide with all sorts of spirit-like rumblings within the world of psychology that were soon to erupt in a most unspirit-like torrent of research on this very topic-perhaps three hundred research reports and theoretical explications in the ten years since then. F. H. Allport (1) and M. D. Vernon (81) have each recently had a fresh look at the field, sorting out the findings and evaluating the theoretical positions, and they have done superb service. Their labors free me to pursue a more relaxed course. What I should like to do in this paper is to set forth what seem to me to be the outlines of an approach to perception congruent with this body of new (and often contradictory) findings and to sketch out what appear to me to be the persistent problems still outstanding. 1 The present paper was prepared with the invaluable assistance of Mr. Michael Wallach.

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