Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This research concerns the effect of learning history for a general principle on the ability to apply the principle to novel situations. Adult subjects learned general problem solving principles under three alternative conditions:(a) abstraction of principles from diverse examples (b) study of explicit general statements of principles and (c) practice in mapping given statements onto examples. The specific aim of this research was to explore how examples given during learning a general principle affect its application to novel problems which do not share "surface" features with the examples.Results showed that examples did not significantly facilitate application of principles over learning only a given general statement. Moreover, subjects who abstracted principles from examples, although they had abstracted the relevant information, were significantly worse at application than subjects who learned only the general statement or who learned the given statement and examples. These subjects had particular difficulty accessing and selecting the appropriate principle for a problem.Results suggest that the representation of specific information from examples may interfere with efficiency at matching a principle to a novel problem. Whether such interference occurs may depend on the relationship between the principle and its examples in the memory representation. This relationship may be influenced by the way examples are initially encoded.