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Identifying the Relevant Aspects of a Problem Text *
Author(s) -
Hayes J. R.,
Waterman D. A.,
Robinson C. S.
Publication year - 1977
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1207/s15516709cog0103_3
Subject(s) - heuristics , heuristic , sentence , relevance (law) , context (archaeology) , computer science , presentation (obstetrics) , artificial intelligence , subject (documents) , natural language processing , psychology , cognitive psychology , world wide web , medicine , paleontology , radiology , political science , law , biology , operating system
Forty‐nine subjects judged the relevancy of sentence parts of a word problem (the Allsports problem). Patterns of subjects' judgments suggest three problem‐solving heuristics: a SETS heuristic, a TIME heuristic, and a QUESTION heuristic. Presentation of the question before the problem tends to suppress SETS and TIME heuristics. A computer program (ATTEND) is presented to simulate subjects' behavior on the Allsports problem. The program is context‐sensitive in that it can change a relevance judgment upon the acquisition of further information. Averaged subject judgments and ATTEND judgments agree for 87% of the items.