Effect of Practice on Decision Making in Simple Games with Simple Strategies

摘要

A preliminary experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of practice on the ability of personnel to make decisions in simple zero-sum two-person gaming situations was conducted with college students as subjects. Four decision problems were used in the experiment. The Ss played against each other in pairs; each S attempted to maximize accumulation of points. It was found that the Ss were able to learn through practice alone to approximate minimax solutions to the problems. With this simple situation no significant transfer from problem to problem was found; thus, there was no indication that learning on one problem had any marked effect on learning another problem. Large differences between problems were found, indicating the presumably obvious fact that the subjects' ability to make correct decisions depends on the difficulty of the decision problem. Further study is needed to determine the reason for the lack of transfer. (Author)