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information would serve no purpose in helping solve that particular problem. Often times
''irrelevant information'' is detrimental to the problem solving process. It is a common barrier
that many people have trouble getting through, especially if they are not aware of it. ''Irrelevant information''
Fifteen percent of the people in Topeka have unlisted telephone numbers. You select 200
names at random from the Topeka phone book. How many of these people have unlisted phone
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The people that are not listed in the phone book would not be among the 200 names you
selected. Here we see a classic example of ''
as would most people, want to use the 15% given to them in the problem. They see that there
is information present and they immediately think that it needs to be used. This of course is not
true. These kinds of questions are often used to test students taking aptitude tests or cognitive
evaluations.<ref>Walinga, Jennifer, Cunningham, J. Barton, & MacGregor, James N. (2011). Training insight problem solving through focus on barriers and assumptions. The Journal of Creative Behavior.</ref> They aren’t meant to be difficult but they are meant to require thinking that is not
necessarily common. Most of the time we see ''
specifically, were numerical information is put for the purpose of challenging the individual.
One reason ''
information, is in how it is represented.<ref>Walinga, Jennifer, Cunningham, J. Barton, & MacGregor, James N. (2011). Training insight problem solving through focus on barriers and assumptions. The Journal of Creative Behavior.</ref> The way information is represented can make a vast
difference in how difficult the problem is to overcome. Whether a problem is represented
visually, verbally, spatially, or mathematically, they can have a profound effect on how long a
problem takes to solve; or if it’s even possible. The Buddhist monk problem is a classic example
of ''
''A Buddhist monk begins at dawn one day walking up a mountain, reaches the top at
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This problem is near impossible to solve because of how the information is represented.
Because it is written out in a way that represents the information verbally, it causes us to try and
create a mental image of the paragraph. This is often very difficult to do especially with all the ''
involved in the question. This example is made much easier to understand when the paragraph is
represented visually.
Now if the same problem was asked, but it was also accompanied by the
corresponding graph above, it would be far easier to answer this question. Here we can see how
''
words to understand or scenarios to imagine. We have removed virtually all cumbersome
information and simply displayed the paragraph visually.
These types of representations are often used to make difficult problems easier.<ref>Vlamings, Petra H. J. M., Hare, Brian, & Call, Joseph. Reaching around barriers: The performance of great apes and 3-5-year-old children. Animal Cognition, 13, 273-285. doi: 10.1007/s10071-009-0265-5</ref> They can
be a strategy used to on tests to remove ''
is one of the most common forms of barriers when discussing the issues of problem solving.<ref>Kellogg, R. T. (2003). Cognitive psychology (2nd ed.). California: Sage Publications, Inc.</ref>
However, like with most things, when you are made aware of them or have practiced finding and
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