ABSTRACT
When attempting to solve a problem, individuals may activate multiple potential representations for that problem. Further, different representations may be activated more or less strongly. This study investigated how strength of problem representations is related to patterns of strategy use and strategy discovery. We hypothesized that the more strongly a particular representation is cued, the more likely participants should be to use a strategy that corresponds with that representation. Further, for individuals who do not initially have a corresponding strategy in their repertoires, the more strongly a particular representation is cued, the more likely participants should be to discover a strategy that corresponds with that representation. These hypotheses were investigated among adults solving word problems about constant change. The problems could be represented in terms of discrete change or continuous change. We varied two types of cues to discrete and continuous problem representations: linguistic cues and graphical cues. Both linguistic and graphical cues influenced strategy use, and the effects of the two cue types were additive. Among participants who did not use a continuous strategy at the outset of the study, discovery of a continuous strategy was relatively rare, and only participants who received a continuous graph tended to discover a continuous strategy. The findings suggest that it may be fruitful to consider problem representations as graded and variable rather than all-or-none.
