Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Individual differences in the abilities and preferences of students have an influence on their responses to information presented in alternative ways. Explanations may appeal to differences in representation or in strategy. This paper reports an experiment that compares the response of students to two computationally similar methods of teaching syllogisms that rely on different external representations of the premiss information. The use of both representations can be broken down into the same stages: translating-in; manipulating; and translating-out. We show that the ease of acquisition and the understanding of the methods relate to a measure of spatial ability and also to preferences for serialist/holist styles of learning. We find that spatial ability and learning style relate to different stages in the two teaching methods, and are therefore complementary contributors to effective learning. In addition, a further test that predicts diverse responses of students to learning the same information from different modalities was used. This is found to relate specifically to stages of translating-in and manipulation of representations. The results of this study support the view that providing a computational account of reasoning and learning requires an acknowledgement of individual differences in the 'starting state' of the individual. These differences can be explored through measures of ability and learning style. This study also supports accounts of problem-solving that distinguish modality and strategy of information processing.