Previous research on transfer in problem-solving has primarily been concerned with the transfer of a specific solution procedure from a source problem to an analogous target problem. This paper considers whether transfer may also occur at a more general level of description, namely that responsible for specifying a common representation (e.g., a matrix) for two problems. The results of an experiment showed convincingly that representational transfer can occur in the absence of a common solution procedure for the problems. This result opens up a new area of research on transfer in problem solving.
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