Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An experiment was conducted in which subjects repeatedly constructed Origami boxes, following example models displayed by the experimenters. A microgenetic analysis was performed on videotapes of the experiment. Results show an increase in speed generally following the power law of practice, and the rearrangement and combination of operations into larger units. They give evidence for the importance of external information in the tasks people perform, and contain a possible example an occasion of insight prompted by earlier breakdowns. Most importantly, the experiment shows how an apparently straightforward improvement in performance can be dissected to uncover the myriad factors and effects that underlie it.