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Moves in the World Are Faster than Moves in the Head: Interactivity in the River Crossing Problem

Moves in the World Are Faster than Moves in the Head: Interactivity in the River Crossing Problem Frederic Vallee-Tourangeau, Lisa G. Guthrie and Gaelle Villejoubert Department of Psychology, Kingston University Kingston-upon-Thames UNITED KINGDOMKT1 2EE f.vallee-tourangeau/l.guthrie/g.villejoubert@kingston.ac.uk Abstract In solving a variety of problems people interact with their external environment, often using artefacts close at hand to supplement and augment their problem solving skills. The role of interactivity in problem solving was investigated using a river-crossing problem. All participants performed the task twice, once in a high interactivity condition and once in a low interactivity condition. Moves to completion were higher in the high interactivity condition but latency per move was much shorter with high than with low interactivity. Moves in the world were easier to implement than to simulate mentally and acted as epistemic actions to facilitate thinking. In addition, when participants experienced the low interactivity version of the task second, their performance reflected little learning. However, when the high interactivity version was completed second, latency to solution and latency per move were substantially reduced. These results underscore the importance of investigating problem solving behaviour from a distributed cognition perspective. Keywords: Problem solving, interactivity, epistemic actions, distributed cognition Introduction Scientists and lay people alike naturally create and build artefacts or recruit existing ones to help them solve problems. To be sure, artefacts such as calculators, data management software, computers can facilitate complex computations. But others, of more modest complexity, such as pen and paper, can help articulate and structure thinking. Space itself is a tool that can facilitate thinking, that is it can be structured, designed (and redesigned) such as to make thinking easier (Kirsh, 1995, 1996, 2010). Thus solving jigsaw puzzles involves physically juxtaposing different pieces to gauge their fit; in Scrabble, letter tiles are physically rearranged to facilitate word production; in Tetris, tetrominoes are physically rotated to determine their optimal place along a line. And beyond puzzles and games, experts structure an external environment to support thinking. Scientists use physical objects and their arrangement in space to formulate and test hypotheses: Watson (1968, pp. 123-125) describes how he cleared his desk, cut out shapes corresponding to the four nucleobases, and manipulated them until he saw which ones could be paired to hold the double helix together. Artefacts recruited in thinking are rich, varied and modifiable. Their recruitment is at times strategic, such that their users actively engage in their design and engineer their function, and at others, opportunistic, that is they are picked up from the environment in an ad hoc fashion to help solve a problem, capitalizing on a fortuitous interaction. From a distributed cognition perspective, thinking is the product of a cognitive system wherein internal and external resources are coupled to create a dynamic, fluid, and distributed problem representation (Villejoubert & Vallee-Tourangeau, 2011; Weller, Villejoubert, & Vallee- Tourangeau, 2011). The nature of the external resources recruited in thinking and their functional role are guided by principles of cognitive economy, effort and efficiency (Clark, 1989; Kirsh, 2010). Actions complement and augment thinking by providing new information, unveiling new affordances, and can sometimes serve to create a more cognitively congenial problem presentation (Kirsh, 1996). Through the creation, recruitment and manipulations of artefacts, new perspectives are gained, encouraging the development or retrieval of problem solving strategies, and improving the prospect of solving the problem (Magnani, 2007). As the environment shoulders some of the representational and computational burden, valuable cognitive resources such as working memory capacity and executive functions may be freed to draw on stored knowledge or develop new solutions (Magnani, 2007). For example, recent work on mental arithmetic indicates that people are more accurate, more efficient, and create more congenial interim totals when they can manipulate number tokens that configure the problem presentation, than when they perform the mental arithmetic without (Vallee-Tourangeau, in press). River Crossing Transformation problems have been the focus of research in cognitive psychology for the past 50 years. In these problems, a well-defined space connects an initial and a goal state. Legal moves are defined in terms of simple rules and enacted with simple operators. Participants must reach the goal state by transforming the initial state