Discussion: View Thread

I was hoping you might help suggest a naturalistic, work-styled task with solvable and unsolvable variants (ideally, where both variants appear to be solvable).

The usual tasks of this sort are Boggle word-search tasks, anagram word-unscrambling tasks, and line-tracing puzzles of the sort used in Feather (1961).  In each, participants practice or complete a first round with an easy, solvable task.  Then, in a later round, they are presented with a task that appears to be the same sort of task (i.e., does not appear, on its face, to be considerably harder), but is in fact highly difficult or unsolvable.

Can anyone suggest a more naturalistic, work-styled version of such a task?  Ideally, I would love to find a task that would fit reasonably smoothly into a study which is styled as an accounting/finance consulting task.

Your suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Lukas