BCS 111 Chapter 13: Textbook Reading 13

• School: University of Rochester
• Department: Brain and Cognitive Sciences
• Course: BCS 111
• Professor: Yang

Document Summary

Focused thinking begins with a clear starting point and has a specific goal; unfocused thinking has the character of daydreaming, or unintentionally calling to mind a number of different and loosely related ideas. Introspection: the detailed, concurrent, and nonjudgmental observation of the contents of your consciousness as you work a problem. Well-defined problems have a clear goal, present a small set of information to start from, and often present a set of rules or guidelines to abide by while you"re working toward a solution. Ill-defined problems don"t have their goals, starting information, or steps clearly spelled out. Domain-specific problem-solving approaches only work for a limited class of problems. Generate-and-test technique: generating possible solutions and then testing them. This technique loses its effectiveness very rapidly when there are many possibilities and when there is no particular guidance for the generation processbut it can be effective when there aren"t many possibilities.