Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Learners often have difficulty following instructions written at a general enough level to apply to many different cases. Presence and type of example (example either matched the first task, did not match the first task, or was not present) and presence of a principle (that provided a rationale for part of a procedure) were manipulated in a set of instructions for computer text editing in order to examine whether initial performance and later transfer could be improved. The results suggest that a principle can aid initial learning from general instructions if no example is given or the example does not match the first task. The principle could help users disambiguate the instructions by providing a rationale for potentially misunderstood actions. However, if the example matches the first task, then the presence of a principle seems to slow initial performance, perhaps because the learner tries to compare and integrate the example and the principle. O n later training tasks, however, a principle improves performance. These results suggest that the features of instructions that aid initial performance and those that aid later performance are different and careful research on how to integrate these features is important.