The Effect of Practice on Strategy Change

Some effort has been made to examine why people often do not adopt efficient strategies, however little attempt has been made to determine the conditions that support strategy generation. This study examines how practice may lead to efficient strategy generation, through perceptual noticing and the elaboration of a device representation. Forty-three participants were required to complete drawing tasks in MS PowerPoint, for which there are a number of possible strategies that share the same component operators, and yet vary in efficiency. Merely by practicing a component of a less efficient strategy, a more efficient strategy was generated earlier on in the experiment. Further, the efficiency of the strategy used at test was correlated with device knowledge. It is proposed that through practice a user’s device representation becomes elaborated, and this in turn leads to strategy generation. The possibility of a perceptual noticing mechanism for problem solving was also investigated, however providing strong perceptual groupings did not aid strategy generation.