The role that the mental, or internal, representation plays when people are solving hard computational problems has largely been overlooked to date, despite the reality that this internal representation drives problem solving. In this work we investigate how performance on versions of two hard computational problems differs based on what internal…

The article reports three experiments designed to explore heuristics used in comparing the lengths of completed Euclidean Traveling Salesman Problem (E-TSP) tours. The experiments used paired comparisons in which participants judged which of two completed tours of the same point set was shorter. The first experiment manipulated two factors, the…