T1:Lecture 5 Flashcards
What is problem solving?
Overcoming an obstacle to reach a goal
What is the 4 step procedure to get from start-end?
- Understand the problem
- Hypothesise solutions
- Test solutions
- Evaluate/refine
What are the three type of strategies?
- Trial/Error
- Algorithm
- Heuristic
How does trial/error work?
- Random with minimal thought
- Common technique in children
How does Algorithm work?
-Rule that guarantees a solution e.g recipe
How does Heuristic work?
-Doesn’t guarantee a solution but often words and saves time
What is the means-end analysis?
- Step by step getting closer to reaching a goal
- Uses subgoal
- Cognitively energy efficient
- e.g. tower of Hanoi
What is the Hill Climbing analysis?
- Process that appears to move backwards before forwards
- Changing the state of the problem becoming closer to the solution
- e.g. Farmer, chicken, fox, grain
Evidence for Means-End analysis
Participants perform series of movements then a long pause
Evidence for Hill Climbing analysis
Transferring an item backwards comes with difficulty as it appears to regress progress
What makes creative problem solving difficult?
Semantic networks. Creativity requires associations between items that don’t necessarily go together
How do we try solve creative probmes?
Applying the way we solved a past problem.
Must have structural and contextual similarity
What are the obstacles to problem solving?
- Mental sets
- Functional Fixedness
What are mental sets?
-Habits/assumptions bringing to problem solving
What is functional fixedness?
- Object presentation influencing effectiveness of solving
- (Candle Problem-Dunker 1945)
