ABSTRACT
People often learn about complex devices by observation and experiment, instead of by reading instructions. The goal of our research is an analysis of what constitutes an understanding of complex devices and a model of the mechanisms underlying this sort of learning. A brief review of the present model of instructionless learning is presented, concentrating on the learners' use of experiments, expectation failure, and the activation and mapping of memory structures, in order to explain observations and construct hypotheses. This leads to an analysis of the representation of computer-controlled devices that will support learning and problem solving. Synchronous planning in the movement and device model domains is suggested to account for the meaning of “memory” in this understanding
