Thinking, Intelligence and Creativity Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Wittgenstein proposed Family resemblance.

In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein pointed out that the many activities called 'games' share no single feature common to all. Instead they are linked by a network of overlapping similarities, as members of a family resemble one another in different ways. This explains why definitions that list necessary and sufficient features fail to include all members of a category.

The prototype approach and the typicality effect (Rosch) and the exemplar approach were later developments in psychology that build on this idea, but they are not what Wittgenstein himself proposed.

Answer: C

The one not a feature of Guilford's divergent thinking tests is Language production.

J. P. Guilford distinguished convergent thinking, finding the single correct answer, from divergent thinking, producing many possible answers, which he linked with creativity. Divergent thinking tests, such as listing unusual uses for a brick, are scored for fluency (number of responses), flexibility (variety of categories), originality (unusual responses) and elaboration (detail).

Originality, fluency and elaboration are therefore scoring features. Language production is not one of them.

Answer: B

This strategy is Conservative focusing.

Bruner, Goodnow and Austin studied how people identify concepts from instances. In conservative focusing, the person takes the first positive instance as the focus card and then chooses instances that differ from it in only one attribute at a time. If the new card is still positive, that attribute is irrelevant; if not, it is part of the concept. It is slow but safe.

Focus gambling changes more than one attribute at a time, risking confusion for speed. Simultaneous scanning tests all possible hypotheses at once, and successive scanning tests one hypothesis at a time; neither uses a focus card in this way.

Answer: A

Breaking a goal into subgoals is means-end analysis.

In means-end analysis the solver compares the present state with the goal, identifies the difference, and sets a subgoal that reduces it, repeating until the goal is reached. Newell and Simon described it as a central heuristic of human problem solving.

The General Problem Solver was Newell and Simon's computer program that used means-end analysis; it is the program, not the process. Heuristic is the general category of rule-of-thumb strategies, too broad to name this one. 'Flash bulb analysis' is not a problem-solving term; flashbulb memory is a vivid memory of an emotional event.

Answer: C

Adaptation, selection and shaping belong to contextual intelligence.

Sternberg's Triarchic Theory has three subtheories. The contextual (practical) subtheory describes how intelligence works in the real world: we adapt to an environment, select a different one, or shape the environment to suit us.

The componential (analytical) subtheory deals with mental processes such as metacomponents and knowledge-acquisition components, and the experiential (creative) subtheory with handling novelty and automatizing skills. 'Creative' is the everyday label for the experiential part, so it is also wrong here.

Answer: B

Of the options, the one connected with divergent thinking is the Mednick Remote Association test.

Guilford's Structure of Intellect model introduced divergent production, the ability to generate many varied responses, as the core of creative thinking. Mednick's Remote Associates Test, built on his associative theory of creativity, asks the person to find a word linking three remote words, and it is grouped with Guilford's tasks among the classic measures of creative ability.

The Guilford-Zimmerman Temperament Survey is a personality inventory, not a test of thinking. Wechsler's deviation IQ is a way of scoring general intelligence, and crystallized intelligence is accumulated knowledge, both closer to convergent ability.

Answer: C

Statements (i) and (ii) are true, so the answer is Both (i) and (ii).

In Cattell and Horn's theory, crystallized intelligence is the knowledge and skill acquired through education, experience and acculturation (i). Because it is built from exposure, more exposure gives more of it (ii).

Statement (iii) describes the wrong curve. Crystallized intelligence keeps rising through adulthood and stays stable into old age; it is fluid intelligence that peaks in early adulthood and then declines. So any option including (iii) is wrong, and the options naming only one of (i) and (ii) are incomplete.

Answer: B

The correct cards to turn are P and Not Q.

A rule 'If P, then Q' is broken only by a case where P is true and Q is false. So the cards that could falsify it are the P card (in case its other side is not Q) and the Not Q card (in case its other side is P).

Most people pick P and Q, which shows confirmation bias: the Q card cannot falsify the rule whatever is on its back. The Not P card is irrelevant, because the rule says nothing about what happens when P is false, so the pairs with Not P are also wrong.

Answer: D

Misconception of regression is not a bias of availability.

In Tversky and Kahneman's 1974 account, the biases arising from the availability heuristic include ease of retrievability of instances, the effectiveness of a search set, imaginability, and illusory correlation.

Misconceptions of regression to the mean are listed under the representativeness heuristic, together with insensitivity to base rates and to sample size. People expect an extreme performance to be followed by a similar one because it seems representative, overlooking regression.

Answer: D

Understanding a metaphor or analogy involves abstraction.

A metaphor or analogy asks the reader to set aside the literal meaning and see a shared relationship between two different things, such as 'time is money'. Recognising that relational similarity is abstract thinking, which is why proverb and similarity tasks are used clinically to assess abstraction.

Episodic memory is the recall of personal events. Procedural memory stores skills and habits. Decision-making is choosing among options. None of them is the core process of grasping figurative meaning.