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100 Creativity

understanding problem solving, it is more useful to focus on the retrieval of
knowledge about the actions and the cognitive operations by which the prob-
lem might be solved. There are at least three types of cognitive operations,
fulfilling three distinct functions: anticipation, inference and subgoaling.

Anticipation
When we perceive an object, we register certain actions that we can perform
vis-à-vis that object and certain functions that the object can perform for us.
Seeing a chair, the thought of sitting down is not far away; seeing a soccer
ball on a lawn, the thought of kicking it not only comes to mind but is hard
to resist. Children need no instruction to figure out that pebbles on a beach
can be thrown into the sea. In general, the mere perception of an object is
sufficient to activate certain actions and dispositions vis-à-vis that object. The
opportunities for action associated with an object are called the affordances of
that object. We can think about overt actions without performing them, so
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we must possess mental representations of them.
Goals likewise suggest to us actions that accomplish them. The need to
fasten two things to each other prompts us to think about gluing, nailing, tap-
ing and tying. The need to reach something on a high shelf makes us look for a
box that is sturdy enough to stand on, a chair, footstool, ladder or some other
means of increasing our height. Failing to find one, we might look for a broom
handle or some other way to increase our reach. In short, both the current
state of affairs and the goal can serve as memory probes that retrieve actions –
more precisely, to retrieve mental representations of actions.
In their 1972 treatise on analytical thinking, Human Problem
Solving, Herbert A. Simon and Allen Newell emphasized that thinking is
anticipatory. The representation of a familiar action contains knowledge
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that enables a person to execute it but also to anticipate its effects. To think
about a problem is to imagine the outcomes of the possible actions before
they are carried out: If I do this or that, the result, the new state of affairs, will
be such-and-such. This mental look-ahead process allows us to evaluate the
promise and usefulness of actions ahead of time. For example, in playing a
board game like chess, a player will imagine making a move, anticipate how
the relations on the board would change if he were to make that move, and
use that anticipated outcome to evaluate the move before deciding what to
do. Another commonplace example is to think through the effects of mov-
ing the sofa in one’s living room to the other side of the room before taking
the trouble of moving it physically (if we put the sofa there, there is no place
for the end table). Look-ahead is quicker, requires less effort, allows us to