Declarative and Procedural Strategies in Problem Solving: Evidence from the Toads and Frogs Puzzle

The relationship between theoretically-grounded hints, strategy selection, and solution performance in the Toads and Frogs puzzle, a well-structured problem in which weak methods are difficult to apply, is investigated through an experiment and an ACT-R simulation. The main results show that providing a state specific hint is useful in speeding up the adoption of a hybrid solution strategy, comprising both the retrieval of previous moves and the proceduralization of a domain-specific heuristic that avoids any kind of forward search. The implications of the results for the problem solving theory are discussed.

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