Problemas, a sua resolução e o seu interesse para uma Ciência da Mente

Studying problem solving through Cognitive Science is an important step towards a more comprehensive understanding of how the human mind works. The results yielded by these studies support and in many ways promote a number of different applications in areas ranging from Education to Computing. Over the years, Cognitive Psychology and Artificial Intelligence have generated numerous contributions to a clearer understanding of how the human mind works in the context of problem solving. This study adopts Newell and Simon’s problem solving theory with the aim of bringing together the several theoretical contributions within the scope of Cognitive Science and drawing up a short experimental design. Data collected suggest that: when presented with an ill-defined problem, the subject converts it into a well-defined problem in order to solve it; designing a simplified version of the problem helps solving its more complex version; a solution can be achieved with no awareness or transfer processes involved. As expected, this study raises new questions associated with external memory representation, heuristic transfer in isomorphic problems and post-task performing evaluation mechanisms.