Chunking in recall of symbolic drawings

Abstract

Three experiments explored memory for symbolic circuit drawings using skilled electronics technicians and novice subjects. In the first experiment a skilled technician reconstructed circuit diagrams from memory. Recall showed marked "chunking", or grouping, by functional units similar to Chess Masters' recall of chess positions. In the second experiment skilled technicians were able to recall more than were novice subjects following abrief exposure of the drawings. This advantage did not hold for randomly arranged symbols. In the third experiment the size of chunks retrieved systematically increased with additional study time. Supplementary analyses suggested that the chunking by skilled subjects was not an artifact of spatial proximity and chunk statistics, and that severe constraints are placed on any explanation of the data based on guessing. It is proposed that skilled subjects identify the conceptual category for an entire drawing, and retrieve elements using a generate-andtest process.The skill of reading nonverbal, symbolic drawings is important for a wide range of occupations including electronics, engineering, chemistry, and architecture. A skilled electronics technician, for example, must be able to understand complex configurations of symbolic circuit elements, and relate these configurations to hardware in need of repair and to the requirements of circuit design problems. While it seems clear that people become more proficient at this sort of skill as a result of training and relevant experience, it is by no means certain how the irnprovement should be characterized at the level of mental processes. The present studies were carried out to obtain a more precise description of what it is that people who are skilled at reading symbolic drawings actually know. This kind of description may be useful for later applications aimed at assessing the skill level of people, developing job aids for skilled performance, or improving training in such skills.The previous research most relevant to understanding the skill of reading symbolic drawings concerns the striking effects of experience on the recall of chess and Go positions. DeGroot (1966), for example, showed that a Chess Master could correctly replace from memory 91% of the chess pieces in amidgame position (approximately 22 of 24 pieces) after only a 5-sec study of the board. A "weak" player could replace only 41% of the pieces correctly.

Instructional Design Consequences of an Analogy between Evolution by Natural Selection and Human Cognitive Architecture

“…In the late 1970s and 1980s, many studies demonstrated similar results to those of De Groot (1965) and Chase and Simon (1973) in a variety of curriculum areas (e.g. Egan and Schwartz 1979;Jeffries, Turner, Polson and Atwood 1981;Sweller and Cooper 1985). It is now widely accepted that expertise, including problem solving expertise, in any area, is at least heavily dependent and possibly solely dependent on knowledge held in long-term memory.…”

Surface information loss in comprehension

“…Indeed, this explanation should fare well in accounting for the phenomenon with a wide array of stimuli: musical notation (Bean, 1937;Sloboda, 1974Sloboda, , 1976Weaver, 1943;Wolf, 1976), technical drawings (Egan & Schwartz, 1979), physics computations (Larkin, 1981;Larkin, McDermott, Simon, & Simon, 1980), or computer programs (McKeithern, Reitman, Reuter, & Hirtle, 1981. This is because at a general level, the processing involved in comprehending these various stimuli should be comparable (see Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978, p. 364, for a related view).…”

Effects of process-oriented worked examples on troubleshooting transfer performance

“…When troubleshooting familiar systems, experts can also use the case-based knowledge they gained through previous fault-finding experiences. When faced with unfamiliar systems troubleshooting, their schema-based knowledge assists them in more rapidly building a mental representation of that system than less experienced troubleshooters can (Egan & Schwartz, 1979). These sophisticated mental representations can Process-Oriented Worked Examples 5 then be used to reason about the system's (mal)functioning.…”