Common barriers to problem solving: Difference between revisions

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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 difference in how difficult the problem is to be overcome. Whether a problem is represented 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. 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 ''Irrelevant Information'' 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 a corresponding graph, it would be far easier to answer this question; ''Irrelevant Information'' no longer serves as a road block. By representing the problem visually, there are no difficult words to understand or scenarios to imagine. The visual representation of this problem has removed the difficulty of solving it.