Program and Protocol Analysis on a Mental Imagery Task

Abstract

This paper presents a LISP 1.5 program and parts of a protocol analysis that model aspects of the behavior on one adult subject (S) solving a set of Guilford's block visualization problems . The model derives from a detailed analysis of S's thinking aloud protocol on four of these problems . Two problem spaces are postulated to account for S's internal representation of the task. Nine operators, evoked by a production system cum goal stack, are used to describe his encoding and problem solving . The program lags the protocol analysis: It respects the two problem spaces but incorporates only five of the nine operators, and these are evoked by hand. The principal problem-solving operators in the image space, Process Block and Tally, both programmed, are described, and the behavior they generate is put in correspondence with, and serves as a set of psychological hypotheses for, S's behavior. Their plausibility rests primarily on the closeness of simulation to S's performance, while their generality has scarcely been tested.