| Monty Hall Dilemma (MHD) is a classical example of probability reasoning. Since this extremely hard problem was proposed, it has drawn more and more psychologists’ attention. The MHD is one of the new hot topics in the reasoning psychology. Previous studies of the MHD have suggested that vast majority of college students even the experts in mathematics fail to give the correct response. Therefore, the MHD is supposed to be the most expressive example of a cognitive illusion. Recently, the psychologists carried out a great deal of studies of impact factors on MHD. However, these studies indicate that it is very hard to help people insight into its mathematical structure. Therefore, MHD is an important subject worth studying.In this article, there were two experiments designed to examine the influence of problem situation and figural representation in the solution of the college students to MHD. Through analyzing the standard version material of MHD, we adopted self-compiled material (hostage situation) which has different story situation but the same mathematical structure as the standard version in this article. In Experiment1, we determined the impact of different problem situations on MHD. Then, based in mental model theory, in order to further discuss the source of difficulties in MHD, we explained the impact of figural representation in Experiment2.The two studies sampled college students as subjects. Then, the article came to the conclusion as follows:(1) Problem situation was one of factors that influence the experiment results. The MHD problem was presented in the form of hostage situation that make more participants select the correct switching response.(2) Figural representation was one of factors that influence the experiment results. Participants’ correct justification (this means participants had fully understood the underlying mathematical structure of the problem) performance and correct switching response were improved through presenting completed figural representation and uncompleted, of the two the former is better than the latter, but the effect of them was not significant.(3) After presenting figural representation (completed figural representation and uncompleted), Subjects in different problem situations in MHD determine the performance of different. The form of hostage situation that makes more participants selects the correct switching response. But the effect of completed and uncompleted figural representation was not significant. |
PDF Full Text Request