Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Why do humans search for better alternatives when a familiar trained procedure is sufficient to solve the problem? Such a question is important in explaining the flexibility of human thinking. This study investigated whether the finder of an alternative procedure intentionally seeks to access information irrelevant to the trained procedure while solving a problem using the trained procedure. The results show that finders intentionally sought more information irrelevant to the trained procedure, even when solving a problem using the procedure. In addition, differences in intentional search may be caused by resistance to the reinforcement of fixation on the trained procedure. This study provides evidence that the discovery of alternatives involves the tendency to intentionally search for information irrelevant to a familiar solution.