Story

There are five things we are going to look at:

• Animal
• Human
• Creativity
• Also
• Fifth

 

Honors Prob

Problem solving is part of cognition. It is the practical application of theory to every day issues.

Outline

Overview

• Problem state (solution state)
• initial state
• goal state

Six Steps

• Where am I now
• Where do I want to be
• How do I get from here to there
• Will this work
• Try it out
• Where am I now

Thorndike & Guthrie

NINE ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF E.L. THORNDIKE

• 1. Founded connectionism
  • Through experience, neural bonds or connections are formed between perceived stimuli and emitted responses
  • Intellect facilitates formation of the neural bonds
  • People of higher intellect can form more bonds
  • People of higher intellect form bonds easier
  • The ability to form bonds is rooted in genetic potential through the genes’ influence on the structure of the brain
  • The content of intellect is a function of experience and cultural background
• 2. Conducted the first animal lab studies
  • Research on cats in puzzle boxes
  • Trial-and-error learning
  • Cats escaped by trying various behaviors until hit on the one solution that worked
  • Discard all non-solution behaviors
  • “Stamp in” correct connection
• 3. Proposed multifactor theory of intelligence
  • During the 1920’s
  • CAVD Test of Intelligence
  • Completion
  • Arithmetic
  • Vocabulary
  • Directions
• 4. Popularized adult education
• 5. Changed “trained mind” to “transferable skills”
  • Locke’s Doctrine of Formal Discipline
  • John Locke (1632-1704)
    • Empiricism = ideas originate with sensory experience
    • No innate ideas
    • Blank slate
    • The mind is like a muscle
    • You have to exercise it to make it stronger
    • Transfer depends on the amount of effort you put into mastering a task
    • To reason well, a man must exercise his mind by observing the connection of ideas and following them in train
  • John & John Stuart Mill “Train of thought”
    • Nothing does this better than mathematics
    • It should be taught to all those who have the time and opportunity
    • Not to make them mathematicians
    • But to make them “reasonable creatures”
    • Once the mind is trained, they will be able to transfer their reasoning skills to other areas of knowledge
  • Thorndike’s Theory of Identical Elements
    • Transfer takes place when the original task is similar to the transfer task
    • More similarity, more transfer
    • It depends on how many “elements” the two tasks have in common
    • Taking a high school course in geometry
    • Won’t strengthen a general ability to think logically
    • May help you later in life
    • If you become a surveyor or navigator
    • Won’t help you if you become a lawyer
• 6. Laid the groundwork for behaviorism
  • Objective experimental approach
• 7. Laid groundwork for operant conditioning
  • Law of Effect
• 8. Laid the groundwork for psychometrics
  • Used factor analysis before there were computers
• 9. Founded educational psychology

PUZZLE BOXES

• Research on cats in puzzle boxes
• Trial-and-error learning
  • Cats escaped by trying various behaviors until hit on the one solution that worked
  • Discard all non-solution behaviors
  • “Stamp in” correct connection
  • Animals not “realize” solution
  • No sudden solutions
  • Time to solve gradually shortens
  • S-R relationships “stamped in”
• General Learning Theory
  • Learning consists of forming connections between specific stimuli and specific actions
  • (S-R learning)
  • The cats learned gradually; blind trial-error
  • Responses that opened the door were repeated
  • Responses that didn’t open the door eventually stopped occurring
• 2 kinds of transfer
• Positive
  • Learning on the first task speeds up learning on the transfer task
• Negative
  • Learning on transfer task slows down
  • Piper “Cub”
  • Cessna “Bobcat”

THREE LAWS

• Effect
  • Responses followed by satisfaction are strengthened
  • Responses followed by discomfort are weakness
• Exercise
  • Repeated responses are strengthened
  • Unused responses are weakened
• Readiness
  • Subject must be able & ready to perform task
  • The cat must be hungry
  • The child ready to read

GUTHRIE

• more dress rehearsals
• puzzle box & film
• stereotyping = same sequence but faster
• learn chains of behavior
• one shot
• stay in place until replaced
• HAM: habits, acts, movements
• pre-cognitive theory: change your behavior, not your thinking
• practice where triggering $ are present
• hang up coat

SIMON & GIGERENZER

• Simon: bounded rationality & satisficing
• Gigerenzer: fast & frugal; ignore part of info

Algorithms

• Search: depth first, breadth first
• Tower of Hanoi

Heuristics

• trial and error
• hill climbing (local high, local low)
• means-end analysis (subgoals)
• root-cause analysis
• focusing effect

Solution Strategies

• Definition
  • Steps used to solve problem (reach goal)
  • Cycle of
    • recognize
    • define
    • strategy
    • fix problem
  • organize problem-cycle knowledge
  • identify available resources
  • monitor progress
  • evaluate effectiveness (accuracy)
• Algorithms
• Heuristics
• Trial and Error
  • No planning involved
  • Reach goal after large number of random steps
• How to Solve It (Pólya)
  • understand the problem
  • make a plan
  • carry out plan
  • look back
• 6 Steps
  • Where am I now
  • Where do I want to be
  • How do I get from here to there
  • Will this work
  • Try it out
  • Repeat
• 8 Ds
  • The Ford Motor Company developed a problem solving model it calls the Eight Disciplines (8 Ds).
  • It cheats by adding a zero step to the process: plan (prerequisites)
  • 1. use a team
  • 2. describe the problem. Quantify it with the 5W2H questions (who, what, where, when, why, how and how many)
  • 3. contain the problem until it is solved
  • 4. root causes and why not noticed
  • 5. find correction that will resolve the problem
  • 6. implement correction
  • 7. prevent recurrence of this and similar problems
  • 8. congratulate your team
• Hill Climbing
  • No planning involved
  • Follow the rule
  • At each step, try to move closer to goal
  • At each state, assign a score to each next state
  • Take best next state
  • Problem:
  • get stuck when each next move leads to worse score
  • ‘Local High’
    a state from which any next step is worse
• Stepping stone
  • finding optimal solution
• Means-end analysis
  • Reevaluate at each step toward goal
  • Distinguishes between planning and execution
  • Detect differences between current- and state-goal
  • Establish sub-goals if needed
  • Means-end Analysis: Painting
    • Apply paint
    • None available
    • Set sub-goal of getting paint
    • Go to hardware store
    • None available to walk to
    • Set sub-goal of driving to hardware store
    • Car won’t start without keys
    • Set sub-goal of finding car keys
• Root cause
• Other
  • abstraction = use model before real life
  • analogy = solve similar problem
  • brainstorming = generate ideas and options
  • divide and conquer = breakdown large problems into solvable segments
  • hypothesis testing = try to prove or disprove one possible explanation of why the problem exists
  • lateral thinking = try a different tack; hit it from the side
  • retrograde analysis = determine which chess moves led to a given position; sometimes called retros.
  • reverse engineering = examine logic of how something was created
  • method of focal objects = what do problem characteristics have in common
  • morphological analysis = evaluate whole system, including interactions and outputs
  • proof = find a starting point by trying to prove the problem can’t be solved
  • reduction = change problem into one that can be solved
  • research = find existing solutions to similar problems
  • root-cause analysis = find cause of problem (unplugged)
  • trial-and-error = try all possible combinations

PROBLEM SOLVING OVERVIEW

• Everyone has problems; come with being alive
  • unwelcome and unexpected
  • big, small, harmful
• All require some effort on our part
• Problems are persistent circumstances
  • cause doubt, uncertainty and anxiety
•  Metaphors for problems and their goals
  • “hitting a dead end”
  • “stuck in the mud”
  • “being lost”
  • “having no clue of what to do”
  • solution hunting as “searching”
  • “getting over obstacles”
  • “getting around roadblocks”
•  Problems tend to be content specific
  • solution to one problem (6 times 5) doesn’t help with different problem (which shoes to wear with jeans)
• General commonalities
  • create a mental representation
  • includes current state (what’s wrong now)
  • includes goal state (what success looks like)
  • often called search spaces or problem spaces
• Problem Finding
  • application of creativity
  • notice what is missing
  • extend search from small problem to larger problems or underlying causes
• Problem Definition
  • identifying the characteristics of situation
  • Two general categories: well-defined and ill-defined
  •  Well-defined problems (well-structured)
    • limited set of options
    • clear initial state
    • clear outcome state
    • Examples
      • calculating price of an order
      • converting gallons to liters
      • predicting the flight of an arrow
      • Games are typically well-defined
      • go
      • checkers
  •  Ill-defined problems (ill-structured)
    • don’t have as many limits
    • Examples
    • deciding to be honest
    • what caused a war
    • predicting the weather
    • deciding what to buy as a housewarming gift
  •  Can move from well-defined to ill-defined
    • Tower of Hanoi task with 3 poles = well-defined
    • regardless of how many disks are involved
    • can be solved with an algorithm
    • Tower of Hanoi task with 4+ poles = ill-defined
    • seemingly infinite options
•  Problem Shaping
  • manipulation of problem components
  • convert problem into something more manageable.
  • approach from a different angle
  • different perspectives
  • framing
•  Problem Solving
  • Use of ad hoc methods in an orderly manner
  • Ad hoc means “for this” or “for this specific purpose”
    • applies to a specific situation or knowledge domain
    • problem solving techniques work on some problems but not others
  • Use in an orderly manner
    • define problem and select which ad hoc method to apply
    • each domain has techniques which will work better than others

 

 

 

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HONORS PSYCH

When you want a bit more than general psych

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Get Prepared

To do well in this class it is important that you come to class prepared. Class is to help clarify the material. It is not the primary delivery system.

Before coming to class, here is what you need to do. Read the assigned posts, articles and book chapters. Watch the videos. And get an overview of the material with a mind map. It will help you understand how the components relate to each other.

Take notes on all of this material. Come up with three questions you want to ask. Submit your two questions on Canvas and get two points. Ask one in class, if I don’t cover it.

Mind Map

A mind is a diagram of information. It helps you see hierarchies, paths and interrelationships. Mind maps have a circle in the middle and spokes  that radiate out. All of the arms relate back to the central point but can intersect with each other. They can be simple or quite complex.

Here is the TOPIC mind map.

Videos

Some things are better presented in video. Films can cover the same material as a book but produce vastly different experiences. I’m disable with poor vision, so TV, films and videos work much better for me. My doctoral program would have been much easier if journal articles had been made into movies.

Here are the LINK TO videos.

Readings

Some things are better presented in words. I’m sorry I don’t have audio recordings of all the material you need to cover. But I’ve had pretty good luck getting my computer to read to me.

If you happened to be one of those sighted folk, you’ll find these sources even easier to access.

In general, read these quickly, like a novel. I’ll tell you what you need to know. These readings are to give you another voice, the same material but presented in different way.

Here they are the assigned readings in order of importance:

• A
• B
• 3
• And

Class

Go to class.

 

 

 

 

Five Things To Know

Here are 5 things you need remember from this class session. Each class covers a lot of material but I want you to focus on only a few items. Everything is valuable but some things are more important

Read all of the supplemental material you want. Explore everything that catches your fancy but here are five things you need to know:

• Repeat from above
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5

Notes

Here are the class notes for TOPIC.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Key Terms

Here are the terms you need to know about TOPIC.

 

 

 

Quiz

It is important to check your progress. Here’s a short quiz for you: TOPIC Quiz

Discussion

Check on Canvas to see if there is a discussion due.

 

 

 

 

Progress Check

Check on Canvas to see if there is a progress check due this week.

 

 

 

Links to Explore

If you want more information on this topic, here are some links to sites you that might interest you.

These are starting places for you, not destinations. Read the posts, look at the resources listed in them and then read those articles. Enjoy!

• Wikipedia:
• And

Summary

Infographic goes here

 

Credit: Photo on Unsplash