<http://schema.org/description>
"(Medical Xpress) -- Stuck solving a problem? Seek the obscure, says Tony McCaffrey, a psychology PhD from the University of Massachusetts. &amp;amp;#147;There&amp;amp;#146;s a classic obstacle to innovation called &amp;amp;#145;functional fixedness,&amp;amp;#146; which is the tendency to fixate on the common use of an object or its parts. It hinders people from solving problems.&amp;amp;#148; McCaffrey has developed a systematic way of overcoming that obstacle: the &amp;amp;#147;generic parts technique&amp;amp;#148; (GPT), which he describes in the latest issue of Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science. The article also reports on McCaffrey&amp;amp;#146;s test of GPT&amp;amp;#146;s effectiveness. Its results: People trained in GPT solved eight problems 67 percent more often than those who weren&amp;amp;#146;t trained, and the first group solved them more than 8 times out of 10."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-03-stumped-problem-technique-unsticks.html>