ABSTRACT
An experiment is reported where three groups of participants solved a five ring Tower of Hanoi (TOH) problem whilst evaluating each move in a different way. Participants were then asked to solve the same problem again whilst engaged in one of three secondary tasks designed to affect different components of the working memory system. The results of this study show that solutions to TOH problems tend to be affected to the greatest degree by very simple tasks thought to affect the ability to articulate verbally (i.e. repeating the phrase, ‘la-la’). However, this effect only exists for participants who originally evaluated moves explicitly (i.e. by giving an explicit verbalised reason for every move). Apparently more complex secondary tasks affecting central executive processes have smaller effects. In contrast, visual suppression tasks affect those solutions where each move was initially evaluated using a simple good/poor criterion. These findings suggest that different types of move evaluation can engender different forms of learning Solutions to such problems, when they rely upon explicit strategies appear to depend upon the ability to plan and this is disabled when secondary tasks are administered which affect this process. Implicitly evaluated solutions, in contrast, are affected by visual secondary tasks but not by verbal or by central executive tasks. It is concluded that the effects of evaluation and verbalisation may not be as straightforward as some researchers suggest. In particular, different forms of verbalisation may give rise to fundamental differences in learning and in the strategies that subsequently arise from this.
