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Retarded adolescents and young adults, with a mean mental age of 10.23 years, and nonretarded children, with a chronological age ranging from 5.42 to 10.50 years, were given four-to seven-step Tower of Hanoi problems that differed in type of goal state. Overall performance levels of the kindergarten, first-grade, and retarded groups were the same but were reliably below the performance level of third and fourth graders. Performance differences were related to the minimum number of steps needed for a problem's solution and to the depth of search required for a problem's initial subgoal. The propensity of the older nonretarded children to search two moves ahead while the members of the other groups limited themselves primarily to a one-move search contributed importantly to the group differences. Degree of constraint concerning which disk should be the first to be transferred to its goal peg also played a role in producing task and group differences, as did the subjects' particular choice of strategies. All groups improved slightly during the course of the experiment.

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