THOUGHT
The study of thinking concerns how we come to understand the world, what our intuitions are, and how we reason, solve problems and make judgements and decisions about things. The cognitive approach to thinking attempts to discover the processing activities that characterize these mental acts. As with language, a great deal of progress has been made as a result of adopting a procedural approach. But the most striking thing to emerge from the study of thinking is that, as a species, although we can solve some amazingly difficult problems, we can also fail on others that seem quite simple. Two main strands have coexisted in the study of thinking for many years: problem solving and reasoning. Problem solving has revolved around the study of puzzles and how people solve them, while reasoning has been more concerned with what conclusions people draw, logical or otherwise, on the basis of knowledge and evidence.
More recently, studies in both areas have stressed the nature of the representation that results from trying to understand what a problem is about. This has led to the suggestion that people form mental models of problems, which represent, as far as possible, the crucial aspects of the problems. In this way, mental model theory links thinking to language comprehension ( Johnson-Laird, 1983), placing great emphasis on how problems are both understood and represented.
The study of thinking concerns how we come to understand the world, what our intuitions are, and how we reason, solve problems and make judgements and decisions about things. The cognitive approach to thinking attempts to discover the processing activities that characterize these mental acts. As with language, a great deal of progress has been made as a result of adopting a procedural approach. But the most striking thing to emerge from the study of thinking is that, as a species, although we can solve some amazingly difficult problems, we can also fail on others that seem quite simple. Two main strands have coexisted in the study of thinking for many years: problem solving and reasoning. Problem solving has revolved around the study of puzzles and how people solve them, while reasoning has been more concerned with what conclusions people draw, logical or otherwise, on the basis of knowledge and evidence.
More recently, studies in both areas have stressed the nature of the representation that results from trying to understand what a problem is about. This has led to the suggestion that people form mental models of problems, which represent, as far as possible, the crucial aspects of the problems. In this way, mental model theory links thinking to language comprehension ( Johnson-Laird, 1983), placing great emphasis on how problems are both understood and represented.
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