Perseveration on Cognitive Strategies

Abstract

Humans rely on internal and extended cognitive mechanisms (CMs) to solve problems. After practice with an internal and an extended CM, previous studies showed that many humans strongly prefer one CM and use it in more than 90% of problem encounters (i.e., perseveration). One underlying cause might be strong preference for the CM that comes with superior performance. Here, we minimized performance differences between CMs and observed whether perseveration persists. Specifically, participants engaged in an object comparison task that could be solved via one of two CMs: mental or manual rotation. Crucially, before being able to choose between CMs, participants engaged in calibration trials to align accuracy and speed of both CMs. In Experiment 1, calibration succeeded only regarding accuracy but not speed. Many participants perseverated on the faster CM. In Experiment 2, calibration succeeded regarding both accuracy and speed. No substantial perseveration was detected by preregistered analyses. We conclude that CM perseveration is frequently rooted in performance differences between CMs. Thus, humans seem willing to use multiple CMs for the same task if performance differences between CMs are sufficiently small. Other possible reasons for CM perseveration like effort or switch cost avoidance, mental challenge seeking, satisficing, or episodic retrieval of previous stimulus-CM-bindings were less relevant in the present study. Instead, metacognitive performance evaluations were explored as reason for perseveration beyond actual performance. From an applied perspective, results are relevant for users and designers of cognitive environments in which multiple CMs can be used to solve the same task.