The cognitive processes of people doing science and engineering

There's a bunch of research about what seems to be going on in the heads of small children who are learning to read or count, a lot of it also seems to be used in attempts to make them learn better. Try asking what you should expect to see happening in the heads of university students successfully learning mathematical physics or trained scientists doing their stuff, and there seems to be next to nothing. Math and science education is cognitively very demanding, and seems to be mostly uninterested in the cognitive strategies the students should try to develop to master the subject material.

Human cognition at this level might be too complex to get a handle on with any reasonable amount of work, but that doesn't quite explain the sink-or-swim apathy that seems to be the common attitude towards getting students to understand advanced math.