Psychology 3130A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Functional Fixedness, Gestalt Psychology, Cognitive Bias

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 3130A/B
• Professor: John Paul Minda

Document Summary

Problem can be described as an obstacle between the initial state and the goal state. Gestalt psychology discussed importance of problem representations. Newel and simon: human problem solving, step by step process, a search for the correct solution. General problem solving misses the idea of domain specific experts (mathematicians, etc) Background knowledge helps you select the correct representations. Algorithm it is an exhaustive search that checks every possible solution and guarantees an answer. Heuristics short-cut that relies on knowledge and does not always guarantee a correct solution: hill-climbing search heuristic that with each step takes the current state and moves it closer to the end state. Want next step to be more similar to goal state. Only make a move if the step takes you closer to the goal. Breaking an ill-defined problem into several smaller well-defined problems: tower of hanoi, cooking a meal.