Thinking and Problem-Solving | Cognitive Psychology
As you read this article, you are thinking – relating what you read to your own experience and knowledge. At times you probably put what the book says into your own words; in doing so you may actually talk to describes. These activities are all part of thoughts.
During most of their waking hours, human beings are thinking; it is hard not to think. Even if you stop thinking about what you are reading, your thoughts wander off to something else – perhaps to the date you had last night or to what you are going to do tonight. In that case, you are daydreaming, but daydreaming is a form of thinking too.
What other kinds of thinking are there? What goes on in people when they think? How are memory and thinking related? How is language involved in thinking? What goes on in a person who is trying to solve a problem in chess, mathematics, or logic?
The thinking process
Thinking consists of symbolic mediation, “Mediation” means that thinking fills in the gap between a stimulus situation and the response a person makes to it. (To put it another way, thinking consists of processing information about the world.) “Symbolic” means that thinking is done with processes inside us that are symbols – representations – of our previous experience with the world. What are these symbols that mediate between situations and our response to them?
Imagery
In part, thinking consists of imagining things: we form images of situations. People vary remarkably in how much they use images. A few report that they have very little imagery, so they must be doing much of their thinking with other processes.
Eidetic imagery
At the other end of the range are occasional individuals who have complete pictorial images of things. Such people are said to have eidetic imagery – or a photography memory. Alexander said “memory artist,” had almost perfect imagery, according to the Russian psychologist Alexander Luria in his book The Mind of Mnemonist (1968).
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Conceptual of Thinking
Much of people’s thinking concerns specific, concrete things or events. They think about the house they lived in during childhood or the football game on homecoming day. On the other hand, much thinking, especially the thinking involved in college work, is about abstractions: politics, economics, philosophy, learning, motivation, and the like. These general or abstract things are called concepts. The thinking people do in which concepts are the mediating processes is called conceptual thinking.
A concept is a symbolic construction that represents some common and general feature, or attribute, of objects. It abstracts a feature that is the same in several different situations. Examples of concepts are man, red, triangle, meticulousness, atom, anger, and learning. In fact, most of the nouns in our vocabulary are names for concepts. The only exceptions are proper nouns – names for specific things or persons.
The ability of human beings to form concepts enables them to divide things into classes. With a concept of red, they can sort objects into red and not red; with the concept of fruit, they can classify things into fruit and not fruit. The feature selected forms the concept, the basis for making classifications. Since the number of properties or features in the world is practically unlimited, there is almost no end to the number of classes or concepts that can be formed.
