Adaptive Training for Flexible Skill Acquisition: Building Navigable Mental Models of Graph-Structured Tasks
Many cognitive tasks, from navigating complex software to learning a city's public transport system, involve internalizing structured knowledge. While seemingly straightforward, mastering these domains often requires more than rote memorization of a single sequence of steps. For instance, a software user might learn a specific menu path to access a common feature (e.g., File -> Save As -> Cloud Storage
). This linear, procedural knowledge works well when the environment is static and the goal always accessed in the same way. However, if the menu structure changes, a shortcut is introduced, or the user needs to achieve the goal from a different starting point (e.g., saving from a context menu), this rigid, "one-way street" knowledge breaks down. Users struggle, resort to trial-and-error, or inefficiently retrace familiar paths, even if a shorter, direct route exists. This h