Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

There are individual differences in complex task performance that can be attributed to the strategies people use and howthey adapt their strategies to task demands (Schunn & Reder, 2001). It is unclear if people are aware of the strategythey use and how this affects adaptation of their strategy. The present study assessed participants awareness of their ownstrategy while performing a complex task. Part of the task required participants to select which objects to sort based ondifferent object features that affect their score. Using a participants selections, their selection strategy was inferred usingautomated techniques and compared to their reported strategy. Participants reported using more of the object featuresin their strategies than what was inferred based on their choices. The features in the inferred strategy only partiallyoverlapped with the features participants reported. In addition, greater awareness of ones strategy was associated withbetter task performance.