Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When teaching, people often intentionally intervene on alearner while it is acting. For instance, a dog owner mightmove the dog so it eats out of the right bowl, or a coach mightintervene while a tennis player is practicing to teach a skill.How do people teach by intervention? And how do thesestrategies interact with learning mechanisms? Here, we ex-amine one global and two local strategies: working backwardsfrom the end-goal of a task (backwards chaining), placing alearner in a previous state when an incorrect action was taken(undoing), or placing a learner in the state they would be in ifthey had taken the correct action (correcting). Depending onhow the learner interprets an intervention, different teachingstrategies result in better learning. We also examine how peo-ple teach by intervention in an interactive experiment and finda bias for using local strategies like undoing.