Problem Solvers Adjust Cognitive Offloading Based on Performance Goals

Abstract

When incorporating the environment into mental processing (cf., cognitive offloading), one creates novel cognitive strategies that have the potential to improve task performance. Improved performance can, for example, mean faster problem solving, more accurate solutions, or even higher grades at university. 1 Although cognitive offloading has frequently been associated with improved performance, it is yet unclear how flexible problem solvers are at matching their offloading habits with their current performance goals (can people improve goal-related instead of generic performance, e.g., when being in a hurry and aiming for a "quick and dirty" solution?). Here, we asked participants to solve a cognitive task, provided them with different goals -maximizing speed (SPD) or accuracy (ACC), respectively-and measured how frequently (Experiment 1) and how proficiently (Experiment 2) they made use of a novel external resource to support their cognitive processing. Experiment 1 showed that offloading behavior varied with goals: Participants offloaded less in the SPD than in the ACC condition. Experiment 2 showed that this differential offloading behavior was associated with high goal-related performance: fast answers in the SPD, accurate answers in the ACC condition. Simultaneously, goal-unrelated performance was sacrificed: inaccurate answers in the SPD, slow answers in the ACC condition. The findings support the notion of humans as canny offloaders who are able to successfully incorporate their environment in pursuit of their current cognitive goals. Future efforts should be focused on the finding's generalizability, for example, to settings without feedback or with high mental workload.

Know Your Cognitive Environment! Mental Models as Crucial Determinant of Offloading Preferences

“…Note that novel smartphone applications are, just like robots, created by humans and, also just like robots, likely perceived superior to humans in analytical tasks (compare to Hertz & Wiese, 2019). However, they are not embodied, less present in the news, and usually more specialized in 1 Please note that other factors like performance (Risko et al, 2014;Walsh & Anderson, 2009;Weis & Wiese, 2019b), effort (Ballard et al, 1997;Kool et al, 2010), or trust (de Visser et al, 2012(de Visser et al, , 2016 likely also influence cognitive interactions with humans, computers, and robots, but are addressed in the current paper only insofar as they might be mediated by an associated belief system (i.e., a mental model). a specific domain (e.g., entertainment or finance) than their embodied counterparts.…”

To organise or not to organise? Understanding search strategy preferences using Lego building blocks

“…Although time-minimisation could conceivably benefit individuals by, e.g., freeing up time for them to complete other goals or tasks, it is unlikely that time would be the only consideration when selecting a given strategy for a task; indeed, individuals can and do prioritise other factors over time in some cases ( Dunn et al, 2019 ; Kool et al, 2010 ; Weis & Wiese, 2018 ). For example, Weis and Wiese (2019) demonstrated that an individual’s higher level goals will play a critical role when participants are choosing between alternative strategies. Specifically, the authors found that individuals’ use of a novel external tool that reduced internal processing in a cognitive task varied as a function of whether individuals were provided speed- or accuracy-based instructions.…”

Do I still like myself? Human-robot collaboration entails emotional consequences

“…In contrast to the less focused interactions with robot companions like Furby, CO is centered on task-relevant outcomes like providing the solution to an arithmetic or navigation problem. It is known that people can adaptively adjust how frequently they engage in CO depending on the situation (e.g., depending on the time costs of engaging in CO; W. D. Gray et al, 2006;Storm et al, 2017; or on whether speed or accuracy is prioritized; Weis & Wiese, 2019) but sometimes fail to do so because of inaccurate metacognitive judgements like wrongly estimating own EMOTIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF HRI cognitive ability such as underestimating own memory (Gilbert, 2015;Touron, 2015). Current research thus provides a successively clearer picture about what makes people engage in CO.…”