Abstract
Ninety-seven subjects memorized nine associations among six interlocking elements that were presented as links among nonsense letters, connections among spies with word code names (after Hayes, 1966), or airline flights among major US cities. On tests of problem solving and true-false judgments, the letters group and the words group performed nearly identically; however, relative to these two groups, the cities group performed worse or about the same on short recall problems and much better on longer problems requiring chunking of learned information. The conditions and effects of a meaningful learning context for problem solving were discussed.
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Part of this work was conducted at the Cognitive Institute of Indiana University and part at the Department of Psychology of Indiana University. This research was partially supported by Grant MH-16817 from the National Institute of Mental Health to the Cognitive Institute of Indiana University.
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Mayer, R.E. Integration of information during problem solving due to a meaningful context of learning. Memory & Cognition 4, 603–608 (1976). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03213224
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03213224