ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how human participants work with the interactive Plan-A-Day (PAD) task, which implements the task of scheduling numerous appointments during a fictitious day. The amount of forward checking in the data was assessed by computing the percentage of “deliberate” modifications that are performed before participants are too late at an appointment, relative to the total number of modifications. Participants consistently explore the feasibility of partial schedules. The quick and considerable increase of forward checking suggests a mechanism of skill acquisition as production composition as defined by Anderson; while the continuous presence of exploration implies that the importance of specific experiences throughout the scheduling process. In order to “verify” the results of forward checking, a certain amount of exploration is necessary, and in order to restrain exploration, forward checking is necessary.
