Thinking and
Problem Solving
Thinking IS Cognition
• Primarily a frontal lobe activity
– Drawing info from throughout the brain
(memory) and then working with it
– Process, understand, and communicate info
Concepts Redux
• Concepts: Mental groupings of similar objects,
events, people/animals
• Definition: mental category that groups things
• Category Hierarchy for schematic recognition:
– Superordinate – PRODUCE
– Basic – APPLES
– Subordinate – GRANNY SMITH APPLES
• Prototypes: best example of a concept
– Apples (basic) – prototype (_____?_____)
– Bird (basic) – prototype (______?_____)
• Schema – mental framework, paradigm,
model
Solving Problems:
• Insight:
– “ah ha!” – the
solution just pops
into your brain
Solving Problems
• Algorithms
– Systematically try every possibility
– Slow but extremely accurate
– Ex: breaking into a safe and trying EVERY
combination
– More suited to computers than humans
• Examples from stations?
• Trial and error:
– Similar to algorithms, but without the system
– Example?
• Heuristics:
– Mental shortcuts that arrive at a solution using
past experience
– Short cut that may not offer a solution
– Ex: looking both ways before crossing the
street, what you do when the power goes out
Heuristic Obstacles
• Representative heuristic:
– Prototype to make decisions about things,
people, or animals
– Who was a cheerleader, Cameron Diaz or
Janet Reno?
Heuristic Obstacles
• Availability heuristic:
– Using most vivid memory to make judgments
– We may be afraid to go to certain parts of DC,
yet we eat at McDonalds. Which is more likely
to hurt you?
Obstacles to solving problems
• With the person sitting next to you, see if
you can come up with three examples or
definitions for:
– confirmation bias, overconfidence, and belief
perseverance
More obstacles
• Fixation:
– Inability to see a problem from a new
perspective
• Example from stations?
• Mental set:
– Repeating problem solving techniques that
have worked in the past, but don’t work now
• Breaking set (add to mental set notes)
– Looking at the problem differently or trying
unique solutions
• Functional fixation:
– Seeing a tool as only have one function
– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09UlB17cg
Kw
Overconfidence Effect
• ADD THESE NOTES IN THE SPACE
BELOW BELIEF PERSERVERENCE
AND MENTAL SET
• Human tendency toward confirmation bias,
belief bias, and use of heuristics, makes
us more sure of our decisions than we
actually are correct
Overconfidence:
Which death is more likely?
• Deaths: All accidents combined vs. Strokes
• 35,900,000 vs. 61,400,000
• Deaths: Homicide vs. Diabetes
• 5,700,000 vs. 23,600,000
• Crime rates: Detroit vs. San Juan
• 572 vs. 665
• Manhattan vs. Gary, Indiana
• 184 vs. 556
Intuition
• Effortfuless, immediate, or automatic
feeling or thought (no reasoning)
• How his this different from cognition?
Framing
• What’s the point? - The way a question is
asked will affect our decisions and
judgments
– How is this like memory?
– Wording effects
Intuition’s Dozen Deadly Sins
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Hindsight bias
Illusory correlation
Memory construction
Representativeness and availability heuristics
Overconfidence
Belief perseverance and confirmation bias
Framing
Covered in future units…
8. Interviewer illusion
9. Mis-predicting our own feelings
10. self-serving bias
11. Fundamental attribution error
12. Mis-predicting our own behavior
Creativity
• Ability to produce novel (new) and useful
ideas
• Convergent thinking: narrow down a list
of alternatives to come up with a single
solution (i.e. multiple choice test)
• Divergent thinking: expand the range of
alternatives by generating many possible
solutions
Divergent and convergent thinking
• Creativity is usually considered which?
• Which one explains answering a multiple
choice question using process of
elimination?
• IQ and creativity?
– Weak positive correlation
Are right brained people going to
rule the world?
• Reese’s Peanut Butter – Daniel Pink’s A
Whole New Mind
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJLDF6
qZUX0
Riddles:
• Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz.
• What extraordinarily unusual occurrence
happened on the 6th of May, 1978?
River Crossing Problem
• http://www.smart-kit.com/s888/rivercrossing-puzzle-hard/