Thinking & Problem Solving

Problem solving forms part of thinking. Considered the most complex of all intellectual functions, problem solving has been defined as higher-order cognitive process that requires the modulation and control of more routine or fundamental skills (Goldstein & Levin, 1987). more...

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It occurs if an organism or an artificial intelligence system does not know how to proceed from a given state to a desired goal state. It is part of the larger problem process that includes problem finding and problem shaping.

Overview

The nature of human problem solving has been studied by psychologists over the past hundred years. There are several methods of studying problem solving, including; introspection, behaviorism, simulation and computer modeling, and experiment.

Beginning with the early experimental work of the Gestaltists in Germany (e.g. Duncker, 1935), and continuing through the 1960s and early 1970s, research on problem solving typically conducted relatively simple, laboratory tasks (e.g. Duncker's "X-ray" problem; Ewert & Lambert's 1932 "disk" problem, later known as Tower of Hanoi) that appeared novel to participants (e.g. Mayer, 1992). Various reasons account for the choice of simple novel tasks: they had clearly defined optimal solutions, they were solvable within a relatively short time frame, researchers could trace participants' problem-solving steps, and so on. The researchers made the underlying assumption, of course, that simple tasks such as the Tower of Hanoi captured the main properties of "real world" problems, and that the cognitive processes underlying participants' attempts to solve simple problems were representative of the processes engaged in when solving "real world" problems. Thus researchers used simple problems for reasons of convenience, and thought generalizations to more complex problems would become possible. Perhaps the best-known and most impressive example of this line of research remains the work by Newell and Simon (1972).

History

However, beginning in the 1970s, researchers became increasingly convinced that empirical findings and theoretical concepts derived from simple laboratory tasks did not necessarily generalize to more complex, real-life problems. Even worse, it appeared that the processes underlying creative problem solving in different domains differed from each other (Sternberg, 1995). These realizations have led to rather different responses in North America and in Europe.

USA and Canada

In North America, initiated by the work of Herbert Simon on learning by doing in semantically rich domains (e.g. Anzai & Simon, 1979; Bhaskar & Simon, 1977), researchers began to investigate problem solving separately in different natural knowledge domains - such as physics, writing, or chess playing - thus relinquishing their attempts to extract a global theory of problem solving (e.g. Sternberg & Frensch, 1991). Instead, these researchers have frequently focused on the development of problem solving within a certain domain, that is on the development of expertise (e.g. Anderson, Boyle & Reiser, 1985; Chase & Simon, 1973; Chi, Feltovich & Glaser, 1981).

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