Problem solving and reasoning - RD1

Question 1

When is problem solving necessary?

Answer 1

When the route between our current position and our goal is unclear or takes multiple steps

Question 2

What kind of process is problem solving? (2)

Answer 2

• controlled (conscious)
• purposeful and goal-directed

Question 3

What happened to the architect with the frontal lesion when asked to design an office?

Answer 3

struggled to progress from problem structuring to problem solving (understood what to do but couldn’t actually work it out)

Question 4

What are well-defined problem solving tasks?

Answer 4

the current position, possible moves and goal are well specified (e.g. chess)

Question 5

What are ill-defined problem solving tasks?

Answer 5

the current position, possible moves and goal are not well specified (e.g. most problems in life)

Question 6

What are knowledge-rich problem solving tasks?

Answer 6

only solvable by relevant knowledge

Question 7

What are knowledge-lean problem solving tasks?

Answer 7

can be solved without needing prior knowledge, all information is contained in the presentation of the problem

Question 8

What is insight?

Answer 8

The point at which the solution to the problem is suddenly realised (ah ha moment)

Question 9

What did Metcalfe and Wiebe (1987) find regarding warmth and insight?

Answer 9

For problems involving insight, participants reported a sudden increase in warmth (proximity to the answer), but the change was mor gradual when solved without insight

Question 10

What did Jung-Beeman et al (2004) when testing insight using the remote associates test?

Answer 10

There was increased activity in the superior temporal gyrus - only when the problem was solved with a moment of insight

Question 11

What did Ellis et al (2011) find to do with insight with their anagram task?

Answer 11

Participants reported an insight moment but their eye gaze gradually drifted away from the uninvolved letter, indicating a gradual accumulation of knowledge that suddenly becomes conscious to provide the insight moment

Question 12

What things can facilitate insight? (3)

Answer 12

• hints
• incubation
• sleep

Question 13

What did Sio and Ormerod (2009) find in their meta-analysis of incubation in facilitating insight?

Answer 13

It led to small but consistent improvements in problem solving, particularly for more ‘creative’ solutions

Question 14

What did Wagner et al (2004) find using the number string game to test insight and sleep?

Answer 14

Participants figured out the secret rule more after sleep, so sleep does facilitate insight

Question 15

What are the main points of Newell and Simon’s (1972) theory of problem solving? (4)

Answer 15

• limited short term memory capacity (can’t hold all information at once to solve the task)
• complex information processing is serial (don’t hold all steps in mind at once)
• trade off between accuracy, computational complexity and time
• you rely heavily on heuristics

Question 16

What is means-end analysis?

Answer 16

a heuristic where you form a sub-goal to minimise the distance between the current location and the main goal, then act on this and repeat until you reach the real goal

Question 17

What are 2 problems with means-end analysis?

Answer 17

• it requires information about the end goal
• it may be a better strategy to initially move away from the end goal e.g. in a maze

Question 18

What is hill climbing?

Answer 18

A heuristic where you constantly aim to change the present state to one that is closer to the end goal - like climbing a hill by constantly trying to go somewhere higher up

Question 19

What is a problem with hill climbing?

Answer 19

You may end up trapped at local maxima because there is nowhere left to go up from where you are - you have to go down first to reach the global maximum

Question 20

What did Koppenol-Gonzalez et al (2010) find in terms of planning using the tower of London task?

Answer 20

Participants who spent longer planning moves before starting made fewer errors

Question 21

What is progress monitoring?

Answer 21

Where you track progress towards the end goal and switch strategy if it is slow

Question 22

What did De Groot (1965) find when studying how well people remember positions on a chess board?

Answer 22

Chess players are better than normal people but only for positions that would actually happen in a game, and they were no better in any other memory test

Question 23

What are some study results relating to fast processes in chess? (2)

Answer 23

• eye movements in the first few seconds are to more relevant pieces in experts
• high correlation between normal and blitz chess - so they do the same stuff in shorter time

Question 24

What are some study results relating to slow processes in chess? (2)

Answer 24

• as time to make their move decreases, skill differences are less predictive of the outcome
• a longer time to make a move leads to better performance

Question 25

How did people training for breast biopsies become better over time? (2)

Answer 25

• reduction in the number of fixations on the image
• fewer fixations on non-diagnostic regions

Question 26

What did Kundel et al (2007) find when looking at how quickly experts find cancer in mammograms?

Answer 26

they search for 27 seconds but fixate on the cancer within the first second (within 1.13 seconds for non-experts)
there is a correlation between fixation time and overall detection performance

Question 27

What are 2 negatives of having experience on decision making?

Answer 27

• functional fixedness (can’t see another way to use something)
• mental set (use familiarity, rather than the optimal route)