Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Adapting ones strategy involves two steps: assessing and then modifying a strategy in a problem-solving environmentbased on performance. Schunn and Reder demonstrated a positive correlation between working memory and strategyadaptivity measured with the Air Traffic Control Task, though Schunn, Lovett, and Reder found no relationship betweenworking memory and adaptivity measured with the Building Sticks Task (BST). We explored this discrepancy by admin-istering a battery of individual differences measures, including BST adaptivity, fluid intelligence, working memory span,and a new measure of set effects based on the BST, administered to 109 Mississippi State undergraduate participants. FluidIntelligence and BST adaptivity were positively correlated, though the relationship was weak. Our measure of set-effectadaptivity exhibited internal consistency and obvious individual differences, but was uncorrelated with other tasks. Thusstrategy adaptivity may not rely heavily upon working memory and may draw upon distinct cognitive resources, dependingon the underlying task