{"pk":25502,"title":"How Physical Interaction Helps Performance in a Scrabble-like Task","subtitle":null,"abstract":"An experiment tested the hypothesis that people sometimes\ntake physical actions to help themselves solve problems. The\ntask was to generate all possible words that could be formed\nfrom seven Scrabble letters. In one condition, participants\ncould use their hands to manipulate the letters, and in another\ncondition, they could not. Quantitative results show that more\nwords were generated and lower frequency words were generated\nwith physical manipulation than without. Qualitative\nresults suggest that participants who could manipulate the letters\ntended to subdivide the task into smaller tasks (focusing on\nfewer letters at a time). Overall, our results can be explained in\nterms of an interactive search process in which external, physical\nactivity effectively complements internal, cognitive activity,\nproviding a reliable way to simplify search, explore the\nspace of letter combinations, and identify potential words","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Interactive skill"},{"word":"Scrabble"},{"word":"word games"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9jw1v5ft","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Morgan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Fleming","name_suffix":"","institution":"Cognitive and Information Sciences\nUniversity of California, Merced","department":""},{"first_name":"Paul","middle_name":"P","last_name":"Maglio","name_suffix":"","institution":"Cognitive and Information Sciences\nUniversity of California, Merced","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2015-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25502/galley/15126/download/"}]}