Juan Pascual-Leone

Juan Pascual-Leone (born 1933 in Spain) is a developmental psychologist and founder of the neo-Piagetian approach to cognitive development. He introduced this term into the literature and put forward key predictions about developmental growth of mental attention and working memory.

Pascual-Leone pioneered descriptions of developmental cognitive growth from an organismic perspective, i.e. "from within" the subjects' task processing. He contrasts this "metasubjective" perspective with the external observer's perspective taken in much psychological research and theory. His modeling of processing involves mental or metasubjective task-analysis, which yields estimates of task complexity from the subject's perspective. Using this method he clarified distinctions between learning (including the learning of executive functions), maturational-developmental processes, and working memory, studying their interrelationships from within the subject's processing.

The Theory of Constructive Operators (TCO), is his general causal model of cognitive development, framed in terms of organismic operators, schemes, and principles. Provided by Wikipedia