Psychology 3130A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Problem Solving

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

Document Summary

Experts solve problems in fundamentally different ways compared to novices. Solve based on: perception & similarity, memory & categorization, judgement, problem solving. System 1 experts better at this system: fast primitive emotionally driven system based on similarities. System 2: slow evolutionarily more recent reasoning system based on rules. The way experts perceive a situation influences what they recall: chess experts" memory for real board positions is better than novices but not at random positions. Novices sorted the problems based on surface features. Experts sorted problems based on deeper features, major physics principles. One does not have to be a structure-in-the-world theorist to anticipate the absence of group differences. Different experts from categories using the same principles, but the taxonomies in which those categories occur are organized differently. Goals and activities do affect biological classification, their influence on categorization is difficult to detect because biological objects have highly correlated features.