Divina Grace O.

Ang 2009-11624 Reflection Paper on Chapter 12

Psychology 148

Problem solving and creativity is essential for us to live. We encounter problems from work, school, our social world, even ourselves but its remarkable to think that most of us are able to play through our lives continuously without being ultimately hindered by problems whether from logic, practical, everyday problems to even socioemotional ones. The chapter discusses how we form our representations of problems and how we find ways (intuitively or in a controlled way) to solve them. The chapter first describes the kinds of problems we face; well structured problems, ill structured problems and even isomorphic problems. I like how the book broke down the component parts of these types of problems, though all of them describe problems relating more to logic and not so much on social issues, I can see the way that our problem solving heuristics or scripts may translate into our social scripts. I especially like the topic of how we solve problems; in this part of the chapter, the book showed the steps of how to solve a problem and I found them to be very practical and very useful. The exercise that we did for this chapter was about a problem of thinking outside the box; trying to solve it was really interesting and frustrating at the same time because I knew I solved the problem before but I couldnt remember the solution to the problem. I found that based on the problem solving flow shown in the book, I think that the influence of memory is aught to be highlighted in the problem solving flow. Though there are many factors that affect our memory when it comes to problem solving (like not being able to notice isomorphic problems) I think that memory plays an important role in how we go about building our strategies in problem solving and of course how we follow them through. The topics of expertise and automatization of problem solving was also very insightful and very useful; now I understand why some people have this vast knowledge and expertise in logic and complex video games but seemingly none in their academics! Its because theyve sort

of isolated their intellectual efforts to how they analyze problems in the settings of their games and failed to see the isomorphic problems that can be seen even physics or math!. The topics discussed in the chapter are information rich and insightful to how our mind organizes and even manufacture novel pieces of thought as in creativity. I have always sought to be creative; I like how the book described creative people as having their expertise and commitment to their creative endeavour. It was an Ahaa-moment for me to read the creative people are thought that have this unique commitment to their project; they dive in deeper to their work because they know more is to come. I would love to be able to do that myself and will be hoping to do so this summer. I learned a lot from the chapter and am looking forward to more of these metacognitive topics in future researches!