Problem Solving with Information Access Costs in Mind

S M Waldron, J Patrick, A Howes, Geoffrey B Duggan

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

Abstract

Least effort tradeoffs concerning the use of memory within the Blocks World Task (Fu & Gray, 2000) are extended to an analogous problem solving task. As the cost of accessing goal-state information from the Blocks Problem Solving Task increased, participants chose to access such information less frequently, and in turn, made more problem solving moves per goal-state visit. This strategy shift led to an increase in the number of moves required to solve each problem, suggesting that effective planning became difficult as the access cost increased. In contrast, increasing the implementation cost, a manipulation known to increase planful behavior (O'Hara & Payne, 1998), revealed quite different problem solving access strategies, and reduced the number of moves required to solve each problem.
Original languageEnglish
Pages2335-2340
Number of pages6
Publication statusPublished - Jul 2006
Event28th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society - Vancouver, BC, Canada
Duration: 26 Jul 200629 Jul 2006

Conference

Conference28th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityVancouver, BC
Period26/07/0629/07/06

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Problem Solving with Information Access Costs in Mind'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this