Elaine.Atkinson@A.CS.CMU.EDU.UUCP (09/10/86)
SPEAKER: Craig Kaplan, CMU, Psychology Department TITLE: "Representations and Checkerboards" DATE: Thursday, September 11 TIME: 4:00 p.m. PLACE: Adamson Wing, BH Given the right representation, tricky "insight" problems often become trivial to solve. How do people arrive at the right representations? What factors affect people's ability to shift representations, and how can understanding these factors help us understand why insight problems are so difficult? Evidence from studies using the Mutilated Checkerboard Problem points to Heuristic Search as a powerful way of addressing these questions. Specifically, it suggest that the quality of the match between people's readily available search heuristics and problem characteristics is a major determinant of problem difficulty for some problems.