ABSTRACT
Bringing together observations and theoretical considerations presented in earlier in the book, Chapter 7 presents sketches of a new problem-solving framework, organised around 12 theoretical assertions. Broadly speaking, it makes two central claims: (1) Having limited cognitive capacities leads to a strong economic impetus of meeting a task’s perceived demands in a representationally minimal way (which in turn may instigate offloading, representational change and heterogeneity). (2) These activities do not take place in isolation, but are embedded in a large set of routine behaviours which are variably in aid of background tasks, in particular of affective and epistemic self-regulation. These behaviours in turn provide a constantly shifting set of cues for an associative memory process over and beyond the current problem state. It claims that converging towards problem space-like thinking can still be seen as the mark of understanding a task domain, but this activity never ceases to be embedded in non-problem space-like activity. It is this latter activity which partially prepares an agent for eventual representational changes by priming associative memory to provide potential alternative leads and which therefore must not be overlooked by any future theory of human problem solving.
