Strategic Differences in the Coordination of Different Views of Space

Participants were trained to use one of two different strategies in an orientation task, which were based on verbal reports from participants in another experiment. The data provide support for the conclusion that participants in the two training conditions searched the screen differently to complete the task, but that neither group used mental transformations like image rotation. These results have implications for research in this area as well as for conceptualizing how individuals perform such tasks. A comparison of the results from the two strategy conditions is made based on an ACT-R model of one of them. Small differences in how information on the screen is scanned can produce the observed differences in performance.