Humans routinely make inductive generalizations about unobserved features of objects. Previous accounts of inductive reasoning often focus on inferences about a single object or feature: accounts of causal reasoning often focus on a single object with one or more unobserved features, and accounts of property induction often focus on a single…

Knowledge restructuring refers to changes in the strategy with which people solve a given problem. Two types of knowledge restructuring are supported by existing category learning models. The first is a relearning process, which involves incremental updating of knowledge as learning progresses. The second is a recoordination process, which…

Evolutionary psychologists often propose that humans carry around "stone-age" brains, along with a toolkit of cognitive adaptations designed originally to solve hunter-gatherer problems. This perspective predicts that optimal cognitive performance might sometimes be induced by ancestrally-based problems, those present in ancestral environments,…

How does the knowledge of experts affect their behaviour in situations that require unusual methods of dealing? One possibility, loosely originating in research on creativity and skill acquisition, is that an increase in expertise can lead to inflexibility of thought due to automation of procedures. Yet another possibility, based on expertise…

Uniformity, that is, equiprobability of all available options is central as a theoretical presupposition and as a computational tool in probability theory. It is justified only when applied to an appropriate sample space. In five studies, we posed diversified problems that called for "unequal" probabilities or weights to be assigned to the given…

In two experiments, we studied how people's strategy choices emerge through an initial and then a more considered evaluation of available strategies. The experiments employed a computer-based paradigm where participants solved multiplication problems using mental and calculator solutions. In addition to recording responses and solution times, we…

Visualizing spatial material is a cornerstone of human problem solving, but human visualization capacity is sharply limited. To investigate the sources of this limit, we developed a new task to measure visualization accuracy for verbally-described spatial paths (similar to street directions), and implemented a computational process model to…

This study examines strategic and semantic aspects of the answers given by preschool children to class inclusion problems. Results show that children understand the semantics of inclusion but are unable to coordinate their semantic knowledge with enumeration strategy. (Author/DEP)

A computer simulation model was fitted to human laboratory data for the Missionaries and Cannibals task to explain the effects upon problem performance of giving a hint and the effect of solving problems a second time after a successful solution has been achieved. (Author/DEP)

Four experiments with 88 college students investigated whether variations in orientation that affect the ability to imagine rotations also affect the ability to imagine projective transformations. Results suggest that imagination of projection and rotation involves organization of spatial structures in relation to initially given properties of the…

A model is developed and evaluated for use in the water jug task in in which subjects are required to find a sequence of moves which produce a specified amount of water in each jug. Results indicate that the model presented correctly predicts the difficulties of different problems and describes the behavior of subjects in the process of problem…

Three experiments involving 163 college students demonstrate that problem solvers use at least two sources of information to make operator selections in the building sticks task (adding and subtracting sticks to obtain a desired length): (1) information from their past history of using operators and (2) information from the problem's current…

Experiments with 251 male and 280 female college students demonstrated that subjects' representations of the water levels in a tilted container could be influenced by problem presentation. Subjects who did not appear to know that water remains horizontal were attempting to solve an object-relative, rather than environment-relative, problem. (SLD)

This analysis of solutions to the Tower of Hanoi Problem underscores the importance of subject-by-subject analysis of "What is learned" in understanding human behavior in problem-solving situations, and provides a technique for describing subjects' task performance programs in detail. (Author/BJG)

The representation of analogy in memory and processes involved in the use of analogies were explored. Results indicated that solutions to a problem can be developed by using an analogous problem from a very different domain. (Author/RD)