Learning from Examples: Reminding or Heuristic Switching?

Introduction Recent work in skill acquisition has suggested that the use of examples of previously attempted problems is critical during the early stages of skill learning and is still common after a skill has been acquired (Pirolli & Anderson, 1985; Ross & Kennedy 1990). Much of the data on the effects of specific prior problems has been published in the crossdomain analogy literature where baseline performance, without the retrieval and use of a prior problem, is poor (eg Gick & Holyoak, 1980). The most complete models of cross domain analogy; ARCS-ACME (Thagard, Holyoak, Nelson & Gochfield, 1990; Holyoak & Thagard, 1989) and MAC/FAC-SME (Gentner & Forbus, 1991; Falkenheimer, Forbus & Gentner, 1986) separate the mechanism underlying the use of prior problems into discrete retrieval and mapping stages.