Cog Ch 13 Expertise and Creativity Flashcards
According to Sternberg, what are the typical characteristics of experts in any problem-solving domain?
He argued that human abilities are flexible rather than fixed. abilities reflect developing expertise and abilities like expertise can be taught, through a combination of genetic endowments and experience does one become an expert.
having large rich schemas contraning a great amount of declerative knowledge about a given domain
Spending proprtionately more time determining how to represent problems before searching for a solution
developing sophisticated representations based on structural similarities
Having schemas that contain procedural knowledge about strategies for finding problem unknowns
automatizing many sequences of steps within the solution procedures
carefully monitoring the problem-solving strategies
What error do individuals typically make in attempting to solve the Wason Four-Card Problem?
They turn over the cards that would verify the rules, instead of falsify it, which is what is needed to do. Subjects who used realistic rules did better than subjects that worked on an abstract problem. 10 out of 16 realistic. and 2 out of 16 in abstract problem.
Memory retrieval information- people solve reasoning problems about familiar situationjs by retrieving specific examples from their memory.
How do the permission schemas and obligation schemas aid in the solution of the four-card problem?
they help solve the problem because they have a general understanding of permission and obligation
Permission schema- knowledge that taking an action (such as entering a country) requires fulfilling a prerequisite (being inoculated)
Obligation Schema- knowledge that taking an action (paying a pension) is required if a prerequisite (retirement, sick) is fulfilled.
How do good and poor problem solvers differ in the ways they classify algebra word problems?
the better problem solver made relations on the mathematical structure of solving the problem, and the poor solvers made relations based on the contents of the stories.
mathematical relations: Good S, 3.1, Avg. S=1.8 Poor S=0.4
Story content: Poor S=2.3 Avg.=.6, Good S=0.1
Better problem solvers are more sensitive to the formal structure of the problem.
How do schema activation, solution search, and strategy implementation lead to problem solving?
Planning is most likely to be carried out by someone who has enough knowledge to approach the task systematically but is unable to retrieve the solution directly from memory. the person with more knowledge and experience can skip the first two steps and just implement a solution out of memory.
According to Weisberg, what is the “myth of genius”?
He argues that although the effects that a creative achievement can be extraordinary, the thought processes that produce them are not; it goes by slowly accumulating pieces of information, there are no sudden leaps or unconscious illuminations. In the prefrontal cortex, which comprises approximately one-half of the frontal lobe in humans, is needed to combine information that has been processed in other parts of the brain. Creativity requires cognitive abilities such as the the effective control of working memory, sustained attention, cognitive flexibility, and judgment of appropiateness, that are typically ascribed to the prefrontal cortex.
“The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources” -Albert Einstein
How can examples of possible solutions limit creative problem solving?
the subjects just copy the examples, and when strictly told not to they still did it after a day, this is called inadvertent plagiarism, unintentionally copying someone else’s ideas. Memory from the examples was sufficiently activated to cause copying but insufficiently activated to cause realization of the copying.
Why are experts in a problem-solving domain able to use “working-forward” strategy when novices are not?
Working Forward memory- selecting relevant information to solve a problem in the order that it should be used in the solution.
Because they have had a great deal of previous experience with those types of problems so the expert refer to the solutions or equations in the order in which they are needed, whereas the novice referred to the equations in reverse order, they go with the first equation because it contained the unknown variable. The experts already know how to solve the problem so they skip the of constructing representations and searching for a solution. Novices use means ends analysis.
Students switch from meands end to a working forward strategy as they become more experienced in solving problems.
Solving for variables instead of a solution helps students memorize the steps.
How do production rules represent procedural knowledge?
The procedural component of the theory consists of a set of rules that specify which actions should be performed under a particular set of conditions. A production rule consists of 2 parts
a condition part and an action part. the action carried out depends on whether the condition is satisfied or not.
Which of Finke’s four experimental conditions produced the highest number of creative inventions?
the preinventive forms because of their use cannot be identified until after the object is constructed. the one with the highest number of constraints proved to have the highest creativity.
How does the shopping-cart problem show that creativity depends on ordinary problem-solving heuristics?
Previous experience of the designers helped them use ordinary problem-solving heuristics such as analogy rather than out of the box thinking. Problem contstraints, expolration, and interpretation were important processes but the generation of analogies was more important the the preinventive structures
Pragmatic reasoning schemata
organized knowledge structures used to evaluate practical situations such as seeking permission or fulfilling an obligation.
General strategy
A strategy (heuristic) that applies in many situations but does not always results in a solutions.
Means-end analysis in which the problem solver attempts to reduce differences between the current problem state and the goal state.
Second strategy is searching for analogous problem that might provide a useful solution.
Third strategy is planning the solution by breaking down the problem into subgoals.
declarative knowledge
knowledge about factual information
procedural knowledge
knowledge that relates actions to goals
