Xie Xinyu, Moss Jarrod
Department of Psychology, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS, United States.
Front Psychol. 2025 Mar 18;16:1445200. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1445200. eCollection 2025.
While strategy selection theories generally posit that people will learn to prefer more successful task strategies, they often neglect to account for the impact of task representation on the strategies that are learned. The Represent-Construct-Choose-Learn (RCCL) theory posits a role for how changing task representations influence the generation of new strategies which in turn affects strategy choices. The goal of this study was to directly replicate and extend the results of one experiment that was conducted to assess the predictions of this theory.
The predictiveness of a feature of the task was manipulated along with the base rates of success of two task strategies in the Building Sticks Task. A sample of 144 participants completed this task and three individual differences tasks.
The results of the study replicated all prior results including: (1) a salient feature of the task influences people's initial task representation, (2) people prefer strategies with higher base rates of success under a task representation, (3) people tend to drop features from the task representation that are found not to be useful, and (4) there are more representation and strategy changes when success rates are low. In addition to replication of these findings, individual differences in attentional control, working memory capacity, and inductive reasoning ability were measured and found to be related to BST problem-solving performance and strategy use. Critically, the effect of inductive reasoning and attentional control on solution time was found to be mediated by measures that tap into monitoring of problem attempts and more effective problem space exploration by avoiding repeating past attempts.
The results support many of the predictions of RCCL, but they also highlight that other theories may better account for some details.
虽然策略选择理论通常认为人们会学会偏好更成功的任务策略，但它们往往忽略了任务表征对所学策略的影响。表征 - 构建 - 选择 - 学习（RCCL）理论假定了不断变化的任务表征如何影响新策略的产生，进而影响策略选择。本研究的目的是直接复制并扩展一项为评估该理论预测而进行的实验结果。
在搭建棍子任务中，操纵任务一个特征的预测性以及两种任务策略的成功率基础比率。144名参与者完成了此任务及三项个体差异任务。
该研究结果复制了所有先前的结果，包括：（1）任务的一个显著特征会影响人们最初的任务表征；（2）在一种任务表征下，人们更喜欢成功率基础比率更高的策略；（3）人们倾向于从任务表征中去除那些被发现无用的特征；（4）成功率较低时，会有更多的表征和策略变化。除了复制这些发现外，还测量了注意力控制、工作记忆容量和归纳推理能力方面的个体差异，发现这些差异与搭建棍子任务的解决问题表现及策略使用有关。至关重要的是，发现归纳推理和注意力控制对解决时间的影响是通过一些测量来介导的，这些测量涉及对问题尝试的监控以及通过避免重复过去的尝试更有效地探索问题空间。
结果支持了RCCL的许多预测，但也突出表明其他理论可能更能解释一些细节。
