Human Cognitive Capacity
The human cognitive capacity limits affect how one represents and solve problems. Experts differ from novices in their problem representations, and problem-solving processes result from the knowledge they gain through their experience with the domain, but not all experts can achieve optimal performance. People do not represent their problems, as and a result, they must limit the amount and kinds of information they encode. Therefore, people use procedures to decide what information to represent, how to represent it, and how it should be used versus calculations performed in their heads.
There are four components to a problem representation: objects, attributes, actions, and operators. The objects are the things in a problem that needs to be manipulated. The attributes are the objects’ characteristics and have values that describe the attributes. An action is an operation performed on one or more objects to create a new state in one or more objects. These actions can be broken down into two subcategories: relation and transformation (Lieder & Griffiths, 2020). Lastly, operators are procedures one can use to manipulate and transform one or more objects into a new state. Operators can be categorized into four subcategories: direct, transitive, conditional, as well asb hierarchical. Notably, this continuum is not just an abstract notion but is the basis of human reasoning and problem-solving.
There are different procedures that can solve different kinds of problems. The most common of these procedures are procedural and declarative knowledge. Procedural knowledge is the type of knowledge that is not declarative but rather procedures one can use to manipulate objects and make decisions on what information to represent, how to represent it, and how it should be used versus calculations performed (Sweller, 2020). On the other hand, declarative knowledge is a set of propositions or sentences that describe or define the propositions or facts about the domain. In order to solve problems, one must have declarative knowledge versus procedural knowledge.
Experts differ from novices in their problem representations, and problem-solving processes result from the knowledge they gain through their experience with the domain, but not all experts can achieve optimal performance. For example, novice and expert chess players both have a large amount of declarative knowledge about the game. However, only expert chess players have acquired procedural knowledge about the game. Many studies that involve comparing experts to novices show that it is easier for experts to make inferences based on their semantic organization than novices (Sweller, 2020). The findings are consistent with previous research demonstrating that experts have more domain-specific knowledge than novices. The results also demonstrate expert superiority in integrating several different sources of knowledge, reflecting the goal-directed nature of chess (Lieder & Griffiths, 2020). This suggests that expertise is not simply a function of a more significant amount of knowledge but rather that more experienced chess players have organized their knowledge in such a way as to facilitate flexible and efficient processing.
In conclusion, experts can solve problems by encoding different types of knowledge in different ways, whereas novices cannot. Experts often use complex problem-solving strategies and rely on their knowledge in the problem domain, whereas novices do not. There are many exciting things to consider in this field from personal experience. As an expert solver, I try to focus on doing my best, as well as there is so much more to everything than meets the eye at first glance.
References
Lieder, F., & Griffiths, T. L. (2020). Resource-rational analysis: Understanding human cognition as the optimal use of limited computational resources. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 43.
Sweller, J. (2020). Cognitive load theory and educational technology. Educational Technology Research and Development, 68(1), 1-16.