Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

There are two foundational assumptions that underlie research in interactivity. First, that resources external to the human agent should support problem-solving and other cognitive activities and second, that human agents naturally engage in this form of offloading when they are allowed to. We aimed to test whether participants would naturally engage with external resources, without prompting, in four types of simple verbal problems and whether the level of engagement was affected by expertise or the experience of impasse. We found that very few people naturally engaged external resources apart from with mathematical problems where it had a benefit. There was no difference in expertise in problem-solving between those who did and those who did not use external props and nor was there a significant difference in the proportion of people using external resources as a function of experiencing impasse. These results suggest that researchers in interactivity need to focus on how and when interactivity is both engaged and provides a benefit.