To Calculate or Not to Calculate: A Source Activation Confusion Model of Problem Familiarity's Role in Strategy Selection

How do people decide whether to try to retrieve an answer to a problem or to compute the answer by some other means? The authors report 2 experiments showing that this decision is based on problem familiarity rather than on retrievability of some answer (correct or incorrect), even when problem familiarization occurred 24 hr earlier. These effects at the level of the individual problem solver and the results reported by L. M. Reder and E E. Ritter (1992) are well fit with the same parameter values in a spreading-activation computational model of feeling of knowing in which decisions to retrieve or compute an answer are based on the familiarity or activation levels of the problem representation. The authors therefore argue that strategy selection is governed by a familiarity-based feeling-of-knowing process rather than by a process that uses the availability of the answer or some form of race between retrieving and computing the answer.