Test of the Concept of “Availability of Functions” in Problem Solving

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Abstract
135 male college students solved Maier's Hatrack Problem (Maier, 1945) in an experiment designed to evaluate Saugstad's “availability of functions” concept. Saugstad has stated that Ss will solve any problem if they have the necessary functions available. The data indicated that: (1) Ss failing to solve the problem had the necessary or relevant experiences, (2) Ss who solved and those who did not solve the problem had very similar experiences, and (3) selecting the relevant experience resulted in the immediate solution of the problem by a majority of Ss. Contrary to Saugstad's contention, Ss will not necessarily solve a problem if they have the essential functions or past experiences. Recognizing experiences as relevant to a problem's requirements, selecting experiences from a given repertoire, fragmenting experiences into parts, and recombining parts of experiences into solutions are functions that seem essential, yet are excluded when problem solving is regarded as a form of generalized learning. Three groups of problem solvers, differing in their degrees of success with the Hatrack Problem, had strikingly similar available functions, but differed in the way they selected from their past experiences when confronted with the problem of finding uses for the pole structure.

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