Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Scrabble-like tasks have increased in popularity as a means of exploring cognitive phenomena, such as embodiedproblem solving, mastery, and creativity. Many of these tasks make assumptions about the key factors driving relative difficultyof word-finding problems; these factors include average frequency of words produced, number of words produced, and numberof readily apparent bi-grams in the initial presentation of the letters. This study measures the effects of each of these factors oncognitive load by systematically and empirically exploring such factors, comparing how these various attributes influence thenumber of words participants produce in different circumstances.