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What's the Problem? Familiarity Working Memory, and Transfer in a Problem-Solving Task
The American Journal of Psychology
|August 11, 2015
Summary
Familiarity and working memory impact performance on cognitive tasks like the Tower of Hanoi. While both affect overall performance, only familiarity influences how well skills transfer to new problems.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Human Cognition
- Problem-Solving Research
Background:
- Understanding cognitive transfer is crucial for learning and skill acquisition.
- The Tower of Hanoi is a common task for studying problem-solving and cognitive transfer.
- The roles of working memory and semantic familiarity in cognitive transfer are not fully elucidated.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how task familiarity and working memory demands affect performance and transfer in the Tower of Hanoi task.
- To differentiate the contributions of familiarity and working memory to both immediate performance and subsequent learning.
Main Methods:
- Participants completed three versions of the Tower of Hanoi task: standard, familiar semantic (clothing exchange), and unfamiliar semantic (tea ceremony).
- Working memory load was manipulated using static or dynamic visual representations.
- Performance and transfer to subsequent tasks were measured.
Main Results:
- Performance was similar for standard and familiar tasks but lower for the unfamiliar task.
- Performance decreased as working memory demands increased.
- Familiar and standard tasks showed equivalent transfer, while the unfamiliar task did not transfer.
Conclusions:
- Both familiarity and working memory demands significantly influence overall task performance.
- Familiarity with task content is a key factor in enabling cognitive transfer to new problems.
- Working memory limitations can impede performance regardless of task familiarity.
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