Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Theories of skill acquisition have made radically different predictions about the role of means-ends analysis in acquiring general rules that promote effective transfer to new problems. Under one view, means-ends analysis is assumed to provide the basis for efficient knowledge compilation (Anderson, 1987), whereas under the alternative view means-ends analysis is believed to disrupt rule induction (Sweller, 1988). We suggest that in the absence of a specific goal people are more likely to use a rule-induction learning strategy, whereas providing a speciflc goal fosters use of means ends analysis, which is a non-rule-induction strategy. We performed an experiment to investigate the impact of goal specificity and systematicity of rule-induction strategies in learning and transfer within a complex dynamic system. Subjects who were provided with a specific goal were able to solve the initial problem, but were impaired on a transfer test using a similar problem with a different goal, relative to subjects who were encouraged to use a systematic rule-induction strategy to freely explore the problem space. Our results support Sweller's proposal that means-ends analysis leads to specific knowledge of an isolated solution path, but docs not provide an effective method for learning the overall structure of a problem space.