I will start this with a term from last chapter... I used priming in the activity with the nails. After struggling with it for a while, Jason finally gave us a hint and put two nails together. Immediately I knew what to do. I must have had an experience with this puzzle earlier in my life and I just did 't remember it. Jason's subconscious priming activated my memories and allowed me to solve the puzzle. However, I don't remember, where, if ever, I saw the puzzle before. Because of this, perhaps Jason's actions triggered a sudden flash of insight. Without any strategy I was quickly able to solve the puzzle and put all of the nails on the head of one nail.
To solve the logic puzzle I used an algorithm. I systematically figured out which combinations were true and which combinations were not true. However, once I got into the puzzle I used heuristics, because some of the possibilities were not actually possibilities. For example, it was not possible for the same person to get two different rewards or drive three different cars. Because of this, it was possible to eliminate many of the different possibilities.
The puzzle with the three different people on a narrow ledge was really easy so I didn't really use anything for it.
The record was challenging. Of course, this was probably due to the directions we were given (or the lack thereof). We interpreted the directions as we needed to just make any noise on the record, so we made an apparatus to automatically spin the arm with the needle. This was not the correct solution, however, since we needed to spin the record, but it demonstrates a few principles. Once we got in the mindset that the arm was going to spin (we didn't think we could touch anything, and it would have been much harder to spin the record than the arm with the needle) we didn't really try anything else. This is called fixation. We didn't have a mental set because none of us had ever done a problem like this before (especially considering many people in the group didn't really know how a record player worked). We also did not suffer from functional fixedness because we knew that we were going to have to use the materials in strange ways.
Definitely a great day in AP Psych!
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how you solved the nail problem was more through insight wasn't it? you had that priming but then a sudden and complete solution to the problem
ReplyDeleteand i'll use a term to explain what probably killed your record player. you were stuck in a mental set. an original and previous way to solve a problem and you developed a fixation on that set. and were unable to see how to make a player using a different way.
But i agree with you the day was fun and we did use all the terms in the book for problem solving throughout class