INDIVIDUAL-DIFFERENCES AND STRATEGY SELECTION IN REASONING

Although individuals may use different strategies in order to solve re asoning problems, few attempts have been made to understand the proces ses that lead to strategy choice. One exception to this is work with t he sentence-picture verification task in which it has been found that high spatial ability individuals tend to use a strategy that involves spatial representations while low spatial ability individuals tend to use a strategy that involves verbal representations. The first study r eported here attempted to see whether these findings would generalize to another simple reasoning task with a particularly inefficient spati al strategy. This was found not to be the case; low spatial ability in dividuals used the spacial strategy while high spatial ability individ uals avoided using it. Three explanations were suggested for this base d upon (a) spatial ability, (b) intelligence or (c) knowledge. Results of two further studies favoured the spatial ability explanation; indi viduals do not have explicit prior knowledge of the most effective str ategy for this task, and the level of spatial ability determines the d egree to which they are able to develop and evaluate the more effectiv e non-spatial strategies.