Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study examines the effects of representational forms on the acquisition and transfer of problem solving strategies. Three isomorphic representations of the Tic-Tac-Toe are used as the experimental tasks. The experiment shows that different representations of a common structure lead to the discovery of different forms of a common strategy with varying degrees of generality. With a better representation, subjects not only learn faster but also acquire more general forms of the strategy. The transfer across different representations can be either positive or negative, and it is based on strategies, not on problem structures.