Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How do individuals learn a complex task? Averaging performance over a group of individuals implicitly assumes that onlyone set of methods exists for accomplishing the task and that all learners acquire those methods in the same sequence.Rather than profiling a mythical “average subject”, we focus on individuals using SpotLight – a tool for analyzing changesin individual performance as a complex task is learned. Specifically, we investigate 9 individuals who spent 31 hourslearning the task of Space Fortress (SF). The SpotLight enables us to uncover the evolution of strategies and the iterativeefforts of individuals to explore and devise new ways to improve performance. To our surprise, these players seem tohave followed a common ‘design for the weakest link’ rule, in which after the current weakest link of performance isstrengthened, an individual’s attention turns to the next weakest link.