Abstract
An experiment was performed to test the hypothesis that people
sometimes take physical actions to make themselves more effective problem
solvers. The task was to generate all possible words that could be formed
from seven Scrabble letters. In one condition, participants could use
their hands to manipulate the letters, and in another condition, they
could not. Results show that more words were generated with physical manipulation
than without. However, an interaction was obtained between the physical
manipulation conditions and the specific letter sets chosen, indicating
that physical manipulation helps more for generating words in some circumstances
than in others. Overall, our findings can be explained in terms of an
interactive search process in which external, physical activity effectively
complements internal, cognitive activity. Within this framework, the interaction
can be explained in terms of the relative difficulty of generating words
from the letters given in the different sets.
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