''Functional fixedness'' is similara tospecific form of ''mental set'' and ''fixation,'' which was alluded to earlier in the Maier experiment, and furthermore it is another way that cognitive bias can be seen throughout daily life. ''Functional fixedness'' is defined as only having that primary function of the object itself hinder the ability of it serving another purpose. An article that highlighted the primary reasons that young children were immune to ''functional fixedness'' stated more on the definition to how some subjects can have ''functional fixedness'' applied. “functional fixedness, where subjects are hindered in reaching the solution to a problem by their knowledge of an object’s conventional function” (707). <ref>German, Tim, P., Defeyter, Margaret A. Immunity to functional fixedness in young children. University of Essex, Colchester, England. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. 7 (4), 2000.</ref>An example of functional fixedness would be if I saw a bug on the floor for instance that I wanted to kill, and the only thing in my hand at the moment was can of air freshener I would start looking around for something in the house to kill the bug with instead of me realizing that the can of air freshener could in fact be used not only as having its main function to freshener the air, but to also smash the bug with. My knowledge of the can being served as purely an air freshener hindered my ability to realize that it too could have been used to serve another purpose. ''Functional fixedness'' can happen on multiple occasions and can cause us to have certain cognitive bias. If we only see an object as serving its primary focus than we fail to initially accept the fact that the object can be used as more than the reason it was made for.
