Subjects had to discover the structure of a logical network whose links were invisible. The behaviour of the network components after a failure gave clues to network structure. Since similar failure diagnosis tasks often draw on spatial processes, a good deal of spatial complexity in the network should affect ease of discovery. Results supported this conjecture and showed that increasing the amount of evidence available to subjects about the existence of complex links was of little benefit. These results raise the question of whether inferences about spatially complex pathways were simply not made, or whether they were made but not retained because of a high load on memory resources.
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