Further studies of the Tower of Hanoi problem-solving performance of retarded young adults and nonretarded children.

Abstract

Retarded adolescents and young adults, with a mean mental age of 10.23 years, and nonretarded children, with a chronological age ranging from 5.42 to 10.50 years, were given four-to seven-step Tower of Hanoi problems that differed in type of goal state. Overall performance levels of the kindergarten, first-grade, and retarded groups were the same but were reliably below the performance level of third and fourth graders. Performance differences were related to the minimum number of steps needed for a problem's solution and to the depth of search required for a problem's initial subgoal. The propensity of the older nonretarded children to search two moves ahead while the members of the other groups limited themselves primarily to a one-move search contributed importantly to the group differences. Degree of constraint concerning which disk should be the first to be transferred to its goal peg also played a role in producing task and group differences, as did the subjects' particular choice of strategies. All groups improved slightly during the course of the experiment.

Strengths and weaknesses in executive functioning in children with intellectual disability

“…Some investigations of young adults with ID have reported performance levels below mental age (MA), for example on the problem solving task Tower of Hanoi (e.g. Borys, Spitz & Dorans, 1982;Byrnes & Spitz, 1977;Spitz, Webster & Borys, 1982;Vakil, Shelef-Reshef & Levi-Shiff, 1997). Other studies have reported mental age appropriate performance on Tower tasks (Numminen, Lehto, Ruoppila, 2001).…”

Gesture offers insight into problem‐solving in adults and children

“…Nine-year-old children were chosen for this study because 9 is the age when children can, on their own, solve the Tower of Hanoi puzzle at least some of the time (Byrnes & Spitz, 1979). Although 4-and 5-year-old children are able to solve the problem, they do so only when exceptionally intelligent (Kanevsky, 1989), when given experimenter support (Kanevsky, 1989;Klahr & Robinson, 1981), or when given an abbreviated task (Borys, Spitz, & Dorans, 1982;Klahr & Robinson, 1981;Spitz, Webster, & Borys, 1982). 2.…”

Problem‐Solving Restructuration: Elimination of Implicit Constraints

“…This mechanism also explains why illegal moves are attempted in states where backward moves or pauses are observed. In their analysis of Tower of Hanoi problem-solving protocols, Spitz, Webster, and Borys (1982) reported that "Only in the retarded group did the rule violations increase (from 18% to 33%) from the four-step to the seven-step problem.... These data suggest that the retarded subjects understood the rules but occasionally restored to violations when they could find no ready solution to the problem" (p. 926).…”