Awareness and working memory in strategy adaptivity

Abstract

The world is an ever-changing place, and tasks that we perform repeatedly frequently change in their characteristics. How do we adapt to such a changing world? One method is by changing our strategy for performing the task at hand. As aspects of a task change, the optimal strategy often changes, so adapting one's strategies is helpful. For example, using the World-Wide Web to answer a question is becoming an increasingly successful strategy in many domains.There is an important twist in this characterization of how people adapt through changing strategies: Any given person almost never switches from using only one single strategy A to using only a different single strategy B. Instead, examinations of performance in a wide range of domains have shown that almost everyone uses many different strategies for a given task at a given point in time (Reder, 1982;Siegler, 1996). Thus, when people adapt to changing task characteristics, there is change in the distribution of how they use their strategies. For example, several years ago, a person searching for a new phone number might have used the strategy of calling directory assistance 50% of the time and using a phone book 50% of the time, whereas today that same person might call directory assistance 20% of the time, use a phone book 30% of the time, and use http://bigfoot.com 50% of the time. The important consequence of multiple-strategy use is that a model of changing strategy selections must be imbedded within a model of distributional strategy selection.Researchers have proposed several different models of strategy choice and strategy change (Anderson & Lebiere, 1998;Lovett & Anderson, 1996;Reder, 1982Reder, , 1987Reder, , 1988Reder & Schunn, 1996;Siegler & Shipley, 1995;Siegler & Shrager, 1984). Although there are significant differences among these models, there is an important commonality: Each model assumes that people keep track of the base rates of success of the different strategies and prefer the strategies that have higher success base rates (similar to Thorndike's, 1913, law of effect). This account of processing implies that, as the task characteristics change, the individual will experience different success base rates for each strategy and so learn to prefer different strategies.Despite the existence of several models of strategy choice, many basic questions remain about the mechanism by which people adapt their strategy use in response to changing success base rates. This paper attempts to address two of these basic questions. One question concerns where the information about strategy success rates is stored: explicitly in working memory or in some more implicit long-term storage? Most models of strategy choice do not describe where the information is stored. However, since many of these models posit no decay or interference to the base-rate information (Lovett & Anderson, 1996;Siegler & Shipley, 1995;Siegler & Shrager, 1984), one could reasonably conclude that the information was assumed to be in long-term storage rather than in To further the unde...

Immediate and Sustained Effects of Planning in a Problem-Solving Task.

“…People also use means-ends analysis and subgoaling to break problems down into subparts (e.g., Anderson & Douglas, 2001;Newell & Simon, 1972) and their history of success to guide future choices, combining it with the other aforementioned strategies (e.g., Lovett & Anderson, 1996;Lovett & Schunn, 1999;Schunn, Lovett, & Reder, 2001). Other types of planning strategies have received relatively little attention in the study of novice problem solving.…”

Tower of Hanoi disk-transfer task: Influences of strategy knowledge and learning on performance

“…Such an interaction was not revealed by the analyses, and instead, the high strategy group showed superior performance compared to the low strategy group at every quartile of the task. Thus, something about this high strategy group, greater knowledge or perhaps another factor such as self-monitoring (Schunn et al, 2001), was related to better performance in the first fifteen problems of the task. Given the novelty of the TOH task, it is unlikely that these participants possessed knowledge of this strategy prior to the administration of these problems; however, it is reasonable to hypothesize that these participants were more effective at inducing the rule-governed strategy very early in the problem solving process.…”

“…Given that Simon (1975) identified the goal recursion strategy as the optimal method of problem solution on the TOH, would the order of problem presentation affect the participants' knowledge of the various aspects of this strategy? In a study by Schunn, Lovett, and Reder (2001), the results indicated that explicit awareness of changing characteristics of their task was more predictive of appropriate adaptation of strategy than were individual differences in either working memory or inductive reasoning. External cues provided by administration order of the items is one method by which such self-awareness could be influenced.…”

Analogy as a strategy for supporting complex problem solving under uncertainty

“…Finally, a related open question raised by our work concerns the degree to which the triggering mechanisms for analogy under uncertainty might be governed by an explicit strategy selection process (Lovett & Schunn, 1999;Schunn, Lovett, & Reder, 2001) or more implicit mechanisms, such as associative memory retrieval or automatic strategy selection (Lovett & Anderson, 1996;Reder & Schunn, 1996) and whether these mechanisms might vary from when analogy is used in other cognitive tasks, such as learning and creative idea generation.…”