[How people process increasing amounts of information as trials go on: reduction of the trade-off between memory and information-processing in the mental resources].
In solving problems in which the amount of memory required increases during the course of solution the subjects would select such strategies as to cope with the deterioration of performance due to the trade-off between the memory load and the information-processing efficiency. To test the above hypothesis 58 graduates and undergraduates were asked to solve a number-guessing problem. In Experiment I, the subjects' responses were categorized and two different information-processing strategies were extracted; the condensation-of-information strategy and the partiality-decision strategy. These strategies were coded as flow charts. In Experiment II, to clarify the relation between processing and memory strategies, memory load was varied by giving the subjects different amount of cues for the solution. Results suggested that the subjects coped flexibly with the demand of situation by adaptive usage of two-layer solving strategies corresponding to the amount of memory load; one was a memory strategy and the other was a processing strategy.
Department of Educational Psychology, Faculty of Education, Kyushu University, Fukuoka.
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Yonekawa
D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D008606:Mental Processes; D011340:Problem Solving