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Water jug problem (and solution)
Subjects are asked to determine how to get exactly some amount water, given three jugs with a certain capacity. After solving similar problems using a particular method, subjects only found the optimal solution 23% of the time, compared to all of the subjects when not solving similar problems before hand. This shows how prior experience can create mental sets.
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Psychology
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Water jug problem (and solution)
Set Shifting
Functional Fixedness
Four Doorways Problem as an Example of Mental Set
A software developer is famous for her skill in optimizing code using a specific algorithm that worked wonders on older, single-core processors. The company has now switched to using powerful multi-core processors. The developer continues to apply her old, favored algorithm to new projects, but the software's performance is consistently sluggish. Despite evidence that her method is no longer effective for the new hardware, she insists on refining her original algorithm rather than exploring new parallel processing techniques. Which cognitive obstacle best describes the developer's situation?
The Chef's Recipe Problem