The Strategic Use of Memory for Frequency and Recency in Search Control
Erik M. Altmann, Axel Cleeremans, Christian D. Schunn, Wayne D. Gray · Psychology Press eBooks · 2001
A requirement of an information processing account of human problem solving is that it includes a mechanism by which people remember which goals and operators have been evaluated and which still need to be evaluated. Whether the task is the Tower of Hanoii, a waterjugs problem, a world-wide web search problem or a spatial navigation task, a person engaged in search examines the consequences of applying an operator to a state by trying it out and perceiving to which state it, and subsequent operators, lead. At some point in the future, the person may, through backup, or because of loops, find themselves in a visited state. Recognition that the state has already been visited and/or that the operator has already been applied to this state, will in the long-term help prune the search space and thereby constrain the effort spent on attaining the goal. This constraint has been used in a number of models of human problem solving (Anderson, 1993; Howes, 1994).