SOME CONDITIONS AFFECTING THE PROBLEM SOLVING

Abstract

The present study was mainly intended to inquire into the effects of preceding trials over the performance of following problem series when the preceding series was diferent from the subsequent one about the cue for the solution. Simple anagram series were used as problems, and were given to junior high school students. Experimental series were divided into the preceding and the subsequent series with respect to the letter-orders used as cues. Though two series were arranged with different letter-orders, these letter-orders were, generally, constant through each series. Each anagram was presented one after another to the subjects at the rate of 10 seconds per one.
1) Experiment I was designed to find the effects of trial number of preceding series. Subjects were divided into groups in terms of the number of trials in the preceding series-6, 12, 24, 42, and 60 trials, five groups in all. There was no transfer effect in the group which performed 6 trials in the preceding series. In the group which performed 12 trials, rather negative transfer was observed in terms of the median on trials to reach the learning criterion though there was a positive transfer with respect to the total number of correct responses in the subsequent series. More marked negative transfer was found in the group which performed 24 trials. As the number of preceding trials, however, became as large as 42 or 66 significant positive transfer appeared.
In order to explain the non-monotonous variation of transfer effects indicated by these results, it was hypothesized that a response tendency at each trial was determined by the composition or algebraic summation of the two tendencies existed simultaneously at the trial, viz., the facilitation and the inhibition, and, that these two tendencies were different in the process of development though they were both functions of the number of trials.
In addition, inquiry was made about the case where the letter-order of preceding series was not constant but was varied at random every trial. Under this condition, only the group which performed 24 preceding trials showed negative transfer, and the other four groups showed no transfer.
2) Experiment II was designed to investigate the case where there were differences between the preceding and subsequent series with respect to the difficulty of solution. In the case where the problem had similar difficulty in the both series, the results were the same as in Experiment I. In the case where the preceding series was easier than the subsequent, the phase of negative transfer was hard to appear while there was no great difference about the phase of positive transfer. In the case where the preceding series was more difficult, the phase of negative transfer was, inversely, hard to appear while there was no great difference about the phase of positive transfer. These results were also explained by the above-mentioned two-factor hypothesis.
3) The relation between two cases where the letter-orders were constant and random through the preceding series was examined in Experiment III. In Experiment IV, the case where the shift of cues between two series was made gradually was tested, and moreover, in Experiment V, the case where cues were changed one after another every block of trials was investigated. But these results were not necessarily clear.