Psychology 2135A/B Chapter Notes - Chapter 12: General Problem Solver, Functional Fixedness

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2135A/B
• Professor: Patrick Brown

Document Summary

Greeno suggests 3 types of problems: arrangement, inducing structure and transformation. Arrangement problems: a problem that requires rearranging its parts to satisfy a specific criterion. Anagram: a problem that requires rearranging a string of letters to form a word. Skills include : fluency in generating possibilities (generate a lot of possibilities and discard unpromising ones, retrieval of solution patterns (ability to solve anagrams, knowlegde of principles that constrain the search (knowing pairs of letters that don"t work together) Gestalt psychologists argued that discovering the correct organization usually occurred as a flash of insight. Insight: sudden discovery of a solution following unsuccessful attempts to solve a problem. Hard to solve problem if: unnecessarily constrains, functional fixedness: the tendency to use an object in a typical way. Inducing-structure problems: a problem that requires finding a pattern among a fixed set of relations.