Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Second-generation theories of expertise have stressed the knowledge differences between experts and novices and have used the serial architecture of the production system as a model for both expert and novice problem solving. Recently, Holyoak (1991) has proposed a third generation of theories based on the idea of expertise-related differences in the processing of solution constraints. According to this view, the problem solving of experts, in contrast to that of novices, often is better characterized as a process of satisfying multiple solution constraints in parallel than as a process of serially testing and rejecting hypotheses. W e provide data from three experiments that are consistent with this hypothesis for the domain of anagram solution.