PSYC1003 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Convergent Thinking, Divergent Thinking, The Technique
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Unit 7b: thinking, problem solving, creativity, and language. Humans can somehow be amazingly brilliant, yet amazingly stupid. Concepts are simplified mental groupings of similar objects, events, ideas, and people. A concept deal"s less with the specific than with the underlying parts of whatever you"re talking about. On purpose or not, we organize concepts into hierarchies. We create prototypes which are ideal examples that sum up the concept. A bicycle prototype brings up a picture of a typical bike. If a new bike is introduced that"s radically different in design, it throws us for a while because it doesn"t fit. A face-recognition study found that people tend to place a person"s ethnicity into their ethnic prototypes. It might work but it is very random and usually takes lots of time. An algorithm is where you go through step-by-step procedures and are guaranteed to find the correct answer. This will work, but also often takes lots of time.