Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Should we give learners a lot of practice with a few problems, or a little practice with a variety of problems? Thebest practice set depends on the way people are learning. We describe two models people employ when learning arithmeticproblems. We show that features of the task environment influence model use. When problems are presented in a purelysymbolic format, people learn an item-specific model. When the task format linked problems to representations of magnitudes,people learn a continuous model. We also test the effects of different practice sets on learning. In both formats people learnedthe practice sets well with a few repeated examples. With a continuous magnitude format people showed better transfer with awide variety of practice problems. Variety led to poor learning in the symbolic format. In ongoing research we are attemptingto identify the optimal practice set for each type of learning model.