PSY30400 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Functional Fixedness
Take Home Points Exam 3
Mental set
• Preconceived notion about how to approach a problem
o deteried a perso’s eperiee or what has worked i the past
• Candle and two string experiments the mental set created from functional fixedness
• Water jug problem
o 23% used the more complex solution
Means-ends analysis: search problem space
• A way of solving a problem in which the goal is to reduce the difference between the
initial and the goal states
o A strategy a person uses in order to search the problem space
o Establishing subgoals each closer to the goal
▪ each reducing the difference between intial and goal
• Problem space:
o all possible states that could occur when solving a problem
• Newell and Simon (contributions of means-end)
o provided a way to specify the possible pathways from the initial to goal states –
but there is more to problems than identifying the problem space
- Initial, intermediate, and goal states
• Initial state:
o conditions at the beginning of the problem
• Goal state:
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
