The Psychology of Thinking: Reasoning, Decision-Making and Problem-Solving

How do we define thinking? Is it simply memory, perception and motor activity or perhaps something more complex such as reasoning and decision making? This book argues that thinking is an intricate mix of all these things and a very specific coordination of cognitive resources. Divided into three key sections, there are chapters on the organization of human thought, general reasoning and thinking and behavioural outcomes of thinking.

These three overarching themes provide a broad theoretical framework with which to explore wider issues in cognition and cognitive psychology and there are chapters on motivation and language plus a strong focus on problem solving, reasoning and decision making – all of which are central to a solid understanding of this field.

The book also explores the cognitive processes behind perception and memory, how we might differentiate expertise from skilled, competent performance and the interaction between language, culture and thought.

John Paul Minda is a Professor of Psychology and a member of the Brain and Mind Institute at Western University, in London, Ontario. As a researcher, he is interested in thinking as it relates to concepts and categories. He runs a research laboratory that investigates how people learn new categories and represent them with concepts. He also studies how conceptual structure interacts with and affects behavioural outcomes. He has done research on medical expertise and on the kinds of reasoning tasks that physicians engage in. As an instructor, and as a psychologist in general, he is interested in other aspects of thinking as well. Every year since 2003, he has taught a course on the Psychology of Thinking.