Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Many of our results in the problem-solving literature are fh)m puzzle-game domains. Intuitively, most of us feel that there are differences between puzzle problems and open-ended, real-world problems. There has been some attempt to capture these differences in the vocabulary of "ill-structured" and "well-structured" prooblems. However, there seem to be no empirical studies directed at this distinction. This paper examines and compares the task environments and problem spaces of a prototypical well-structured problem (cryptarithmetic) with the task environments and problem spaces of a class of prototypical illstructured problems (design problems). Results indicate substantive differences, both in the task environments and the problem spaces.