thinking summary

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Below is the article summary. For the full article, see thought.

thinking, or thought, Action of using one’s mind to produce thoughts, or covert symbolic responses to stimuli. Theories of thought and thought processes have concentrated largely on directed thinking, including problem solving. At the beginning of the 20th century, researchers focused on studying mental associations. Theorists of Gestalt psychology in the 1920s and ’30s believed the elements of thought to be in the nature of patterns elicited from experience. Today these elements are often regarded as bits of information undergoing processing. See also cognitive psychology, information processing.

concept formation Summary

Concept formation, process by which a person learns to sort specific experiences into general rules or classes. With regard to action, a person picks up a particular stone or drives a specific car. With regard to thought, however, a person appears to deal with classes. For instance, one knows that

dream Summary

Dream, a hallucinatory experience that occurs during sleep. Dreaming, a common and distinctive phenomenon of sleep, has throughout human history given rise to myriad beliefs, fears, and conjectures, both imaginative and experimental, regarding its mysterious nature. While any effort toward