PSY 3120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 23: Functional Fixedness, Eureka Effect, Cognitive Revolution

• School: Vanderbilt University
• Department: Psychology (A&S)
• Course: PSY 3120
• Professor: Seiffert Adriane

Document Summary

Problems that elicit a sudden realization of the solution rather than slow and steady progress towards it (aha experience) Problem solving is about representation of the problem in the mind and restructuring the representation to find the solution. Kohler: problems with initial representations that do not include a key step to the solution. Intelligence is creating the path to a solution. Insight problems are not solved through s r conditioning or learning by observation: must involve the internal reorganization of information; restructuring of representations. Compared incremental problems, math problems and insight problems. Asked every 15 seconds to give warmth rating about how close they were to finding the solution. Insight problems were pretty low until right before while other were incrementally increasing until the solution was found. People generally overestimate ability to solve insight problems. Functional fixedness: associating an object with a particular function so strongly that other possible uses for the object are not discovered.