Psychology

Thinking out loud helps solve assigned tasks more successfully, as Spanish scientists have found. The researchers’ article appeared in the journal Electronic Journal of Research in Educational Psychology, and a brief summary of it is given in a press release from the University of Granada, whose staff took part in the work.As part of the study, the scientists were interested in the academic activities of senior students at UGR. The experiment participants were isolated from one another, and their behaviour was recorded on video camera. During the experiment the scientists asked the volunteers to solve tasks first in silence and then while thinking out loud. As a result the researchers established that, by reasoning aloud, the volunteers not only solved the tasks faster but also managed more complex assignments. In addition, a further increase in efficiency was observed when the students were allowed to use a graphical representation of the information. The researchers hope that their results will help in creating effective mechanisms of thinking and solving specific applied problems. In particular, the scientists emphasise that presenting a task in a convenient form (graphical and auditory, in this case) is a key factor in solving it. Generally speaking, the authors of the new study are not interested in the mechanisms of thinking. Quite recently another group of researchers became interested in a different way of increasing the efficiency of problem-solving — reducing the number of errors. To this end they analysed the classic conjunction fallacy in probability estimation. It turned out that quantum logic is responsible for the appearance of errors in this case.