Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A widely-accepted notion is that organization can improve task performance and generally allow us to better functionwithin a given task environment (Kirsh, 1995; 1996). However, it remains unclear the extent to which individuals believe thatorganization will help to improve task performance when they are asked to carry out mundane tasks in the real world. Toexamine this, individuals were asked to search through a pile of Lego building blocks for specific pieces. Prior to the searchtask, they were asked their preferred strategy for this task (e.g., organizing vs. not organizing the Lego pile prior to search) andto estimate how much time and effort each strategy would take for task completion. While both strategies were comparable interms of objective task completion time and subjective time and effort estimations, participants were overwhelmingly biasedagainst choosing the organization strategy. Implications for the current study will be discussed.