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    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.

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    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.