Tivelve Cognitive Processes That Underlie Learning 47 transfer across domains but not that much. (Learning to buy an air- plane ticket is somewhat related to eating in a restaurant, but not that closely. You might use a credit card in each, for example, and might be refused service because you are rude.) 2. Modeling: Building a conscious model of a process We need to learn how things work. A citizen knows, presumably, how voting works. Someone looking for venture capital should know how fund raising works. Processes need to be learned in order to ef- fectively participate in them and in order to propose changes in them. Building a conscious model of a process matters a great deal if you want to make the process work for you. If you want to get into col- lege, you need to understand how the process works. This cannot be learned from experience in a serious way because one may do it only once and may not be able to experience the entire process. Having the process explained to you may not work that well either because this will not bring an operational understanding of it (as opposed to a more superficial understanding of it). Designing it, modifying it, and participating in simulations of it work much better as learning methods. 3. Experimentation: Experimentation and replanning based on success and failure This is probably the most important learning process we engage in while living our lives. We make life decisions and we need to know when we need to change something. There are big decisions—like getting married or how to raise a child or whether to change jobs— and little decisions, such as changing your diet or your sleep habits. We make our decisions on the basis of what has worked before and what has failed to work. We tend to make life decisions without much knowledge. We don’t know how our bodies work all that well and we don’t really know how the world works or what it has in store for us. Thinking about these issues and learning from failure is a pressin