ABSTRACT
Discussions in the psychological literature of cognitive processes generally treat separately a category of behavior called “problem solving,” on the one hand, and a category called “concept attainment,” “pattern induction,” or “rule discovery,” on the other. We will use the phrase “rule induction” to refer to any of the diverse tasks in the second category. We find this division already in the 1938 edition of Woodworth’s Experimental Psychology, where the penultimate chapter is devoted to problem-solving behavior, and the final chapter primarily to rule induction. In explanation of this organization, Woodworth comments:
Two chapters will not be too many for the large topic of thinking, and we may make the division according to the historical sources of two streams of experimentation, which do indeed merge in the more recent work. One stream arose in the study of animal behavior and went on to human problem solving; the other started with human thinking of the more verbal sort [Woodworth, 1938, p. 746].
