The Role of Individual Differences in Determining Interaction Strategies and Performance on Computer Based Tasks

Abstract

In completing any given task, whether it be driving or a computer task, indviduals have a wide array of strategies available to them. Investigations of computer tasks have shown that individual differences of cognitive styles and abilites are related to the types of strategies individuals use to complete the task (Schmidt-Nielsen and Ackerman, 1993). Typically, those who have higher reasoning abilities use more sophisticated strategies for performing the task than those with a lower level of ability. Further, it has been demonstrated that these strategies tend to hold over a variety of tasks. For example, performance on a computer graphing task was shown to be correlated to cognitive reasoning ability. The current study extended the work of Schmidt-Nielsen and Ackerman and found that there were a wide variety of performance strategies and these strategies were correlated with reasoning ability, field dependency, and performance on the noun pair task.