Problem Solving with Information Access Costs in Mind

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.