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For example:
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
numbers? <ref>Weiten, Wayne. (2011). Psychology: themes and variations (8th ed.). California: Wadsworth.</ref>
The people that are not listed in the phone book would not be among the 200 names you
selected. The
▲The individual looking at this task would naturally 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
One reason ''Irrelevant Information'' is so effective at keeping a person off topic and away from the relevant 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
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visually, verbally, spatially, or mathematically, irrelevant information can have a profound effect on how long a problem takes to be solved; or if it’s even possible. The Buddhist monk problem is a classic example of ''Irrelevant Information'' and how it can be represented in different ways:
''A Buddhist monk begins at dawn one day walking up a mountain, reaches the top at
sunset, meditates at the top for several days until one dawn when he begins to walk back to the
foot of the mountain, which he reaches at sunset. Making no assumptions about his starting or
stopping or about his pace during the trips, prove that there is a place on the path which he
occupies at the same hour of the day on the two separate journeys.''
This problem is near impossible to solve because of how the information is represented.
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