Interactive skills and individual differences in a word production task |
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Authors: | Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau Miles Wrightman |
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Affiliation: | (1) Psychology Research Unit, School of Social Science, Kingston University, Penrhyn Road, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, KT1 2EE, UK |
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Abstract: | In attempting to solve a wide variety of tasks, people naturally seek to modify their external environment such that the physical
space in which they work is more amenable or ‘congenial’ to achieving a desired outcome. Attempts to determine the effectiveness
of certain artifacts or spatial reorganizations in aiding reasoners solve problems must be relativised to the difficulty of
the task and the cognitive abilities of the reasoners. These factors were examined using a simple word production task with
letter tiles. Two sets of tiles that differed in terms of word production difficulty were selected. Participants were asked
to produce as many words as they could within a finite time period for each letter set. In one group, participants were encouraged
to rearrange or touch the tiles when producing words, and in the other group, participants could not interact with or point
to the tiles. Participants were further split in a low and high verbal fluency group as a function of their score on the Thurstone
word fluency test taken at the end of the experiment. In the high fluency group, letter rearrangement did not improve the
participants’ ability to generate words. In contrast, in the low verbal fluency group, letter rearrangement significantly
enhanced the ability to produce new words from both the hard and easy letter set. For these participants, the task was more
taxing and the opportunity to restructure the letter set substantially elevated their performance. The advantages of a distributed
cognition analysis of this and other reasoning tasks are discussed. |
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