Flexible Strategy Use in Young Children ’ s Tic - Tat - Toe KEVIN CROWLEY

In domains with multiple competing goals, people face a basic challenge: How to make their strategy use flexible enough to deal with shifting circumstances without losing track of their overall objectives. This article examines how young children meet this challenge in one such domoin, tic-tot-toe. Experiment 1 provides an overview of development in the area: it indicates that children’s tic-tat-toe strotegies are rule based and that new rules ore added one at o time. Experiment 2 demonstrates that even young children flexibly tailor their strategy use to meet shifting circumstances. Experiment 3 indicates that these adaptations are accomplished through a process of goal-based resource allocation, whereby children focus their cognitive resources on opplying rules most consistent with their current primary goal. A computer simulation specifies how this process works and demonstrotes its sufficiency for producing behovior much like thot of the children. The findings ore discussed as part of a brooder framework of mechanisms for generating problem-solving approaches.