Strategy development in a block design task

Abstract For 90 subjects aged 12, 17, and adult, strategy development was studied in a computerized task derived from Kohs blocks. The effect of a structural variable was tested: the nature of the gestalts (triangles or stripes) in the test designs. Based on the automatic analysis of several behavior indices, three strategies were identified: global and analytic, but also “synthetic,” in which the subject solved the problem by relying on gestalts. The results showed that (1) younger subjects more often used the global strategy and (2) designs with stripes turned out to be far more complex than ones with triangles, especially for the younger subjects. The results are discussed in the light of recent work in cognitive and developmental psychology.