AP PSYCH 5.7 Introduction to Thinking and Problem Solving
Thinking
- Trying to define thinking is incredibly hard
- There are two simple ways to look at thinking
- Looking at structures of thinking, like Wilhelm Wundt did, or how MRIs do
- We can also look at the functions of thinking, like William James, or what fMRIs do
Structures
- A concept is a cluster of raw cognitive material
- Very difficult to have a concept on its own
- You will either forget it or it will join with something else and no longer be independent
- Our mind tried to organize concepts so that we don’t have untethered pieces of material stored
- A prototype is a great abstract example
- Not the perfect, catch-all example, but a really good one
- When instructed to think of a dog, disregarding any specific dogs that come to mind, you probably think of a middle size dog
- Not the biggest, not the smallest, but something that encapsulates the average dog size
- An exemplar is the best example you have from experience, but experience can be limited
- This would be the specific dog that you may have thought of initially
- An artificial concept is the absolute perfect example of itself
- We rarely think perfect thoughts
- This does, however, exist; in geometry, a circle is a circle, and it cannot be anything else or any other shape without no longer being a circle
Functions
- We’ll focus on problem solving
Informal Reasoning
- Informal reasoning is like thinking fast, taking short cuts to reach a solution
- Heuristics are short cuts, often based on experience, usually work but not always, fast and efficient
- Top-down processing involves already having an idea of a situation before having the details
- This can influence how you perceive new information
- A schema is a set of ideas or concepts that help us solve problems
- Mental sets are similar to schema; they are ways of thinking that have worked before
- Mental models are a way of thinking about how thinks interact
- Bricks shatter glass, we know that’s how the two objects will interact
Formal Reasoning
- Formal reasoning is thinking slow, where we don’t use shortcuts, but we can be much more certain
- An algorithm is a step-by-step process that is guaranteed to work
- Bottom-up processing is gathering as many data pieces as possible before coming to a conclusion
- Syllogism is just using logic
- Analyzing the situation, seeing relationships, and finding a solution
- Diagnosis is eliminating wrong answers until the right one is left
- Artificial intelligence is similar to algorithms
- Computers use many step-by-step processes to expand into complex functions like facial recognition, self-driving, text prediction, etc.