Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

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Prologue

Eureka!
Cliff ord Matson’s “Eureka!” moment arrived the day the silverfi sh 
invaded his bathroom. 
Dr. Matson, tall, white-haired and retired after 50 years of 
practicing dentistry in his hometown of Junction City, Oregon, 
was fretting about the insects skittering around the bathroom. 
Then several seemingly unrelated thoughts collided in his mind. 
One was about the pesky silverfi sh. One concerned a book he 
was reading about neem trees, tropical trees grown in India and 
Burma that have seeds with their own natural pesticides. The 
third thought arrived when Dr. Matson noticed the small cork 
squares separating the double-pane windows in the bathroom. 
A couple of drops of neem oil on one of those little cork 
squares ought to be just the ticket to get rid of silverfi sh, 
Dr. Matson thought. 
He tried it, and the silverfi sh died. Then he tried the neem 
oil–soaked cork squares on cockroaches, and they bit the dust as 
well. 
Two years ago the U.S. Patent and Trademark Offi
ce granted 
Dr. Matson Patent No. 6,093,413 for Cork-EZ, an adhesive-backed 
piece of cork the size of a Scrabble square that delivers a natural 
pesticide derived from cedar bark. (Richardson, 2002, p. R7).

Looking
Ahead

Cliff ord Matson has big plans for his invention. But whether or 
not Cork-EZ revolutionizes the extermination fi eld, it is clear that 
Matson has that elusive quality that marks successful inventors: 
creativity. 
Where does Matson’s creativity come from? More generally, 
how do people use information to devise innovative solutions to 
problems? And how do people think about, understand, and, 
through language, describe the world? 
Answers to these questions come from cognitive psychology,
the branch of psychology that focuses on the study of higher 
mental processes, including thinking, language, memory, 
problem solving, knowing, reasoning, judging, and decision 
making. Clearly, the realm of cognitive psychology is broad.
Cognitive psychology centers on three major topics: thinking 
and reasoning, problem solving and creativity, and language. The 
fi rst topic we consider in this chapter is thinking and reasoning. 
Then we examine diff erent strategies for approaching problems, 
means of generating solutions, and ways of making judgments 
about the usefulness and accuracy of solutions. Finally, we discuss 
how language is developed and acquired, its basic characteristics, 
and the relationship between language and thought.