Promoting thinking in terms of causal structures: Impact on performance in solving complex problems

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

Abstract

Goldwater and Gentner (2015) showed that the sensitivity for causal structures can be promoted with an intervention combining explication of causal models and guided structural alignment of situations from disparate fields with the same underlying causal model. We extended this intervention with inference questions and combined it with a subsequent complex problem-solving (CPS) task, in order to investigate whether enhanced sensitivity for causal structures results in better performance in CPS. This study (N = 108) compares the CPS performance indicators knowledge acquisition and knowledge application among three experimental groups (intervention, intervention extended with inference questions, control group) and reveals the following results: 1) The effectiveness of the intervention in increasing the sensitivity for causal structures was replicated. 2) Sensitivity for causal structures and CPS performance indicators were significantly positively correlated. 3) There is no direct effect of the intervention on CPS performance, but an indirect-only effect via enhanced sensitivity.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)2059-2065
Number of pages7
JournalAnnual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci)
Volume43
Publication statusPublished - 2021
Peer-reviewedYes

Conference

Title43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds, CogSci 2021
Duration26 - 29 July 2021
CityVirtual, Online
CountryAustria

External IDs

Scopus 85139408773
ORCID /0000-0002-1972-1567/work/141545675
ORCID /0000-0001-5165-4459/work/142248301
ORCID /0000-0002-4280-6534/work/142660246

Keywords

Keywords

  • analogical transfer, complex problem-solving, education, relational categorization