Q.Explain the nature of thinking.

Thinking is defined in this chapter as the base of all cognitive activity and a mental process unique to human beings, which involves manipulating and analysing information taken in from the environment or drawn from what a person already knows. Looking at a painting, for example, is not simply registering colour and line — it involves interpreting the image and connecting it with existing knowledge, which is why understanding a painting is described as creating new meaning that then gets added to a person's stored knowledge.

A first key feature of thinking is that it is mostly organised and goal-directed: everyday activities, from cooking to solving a mathematics problem, are carried out with a goal in mind, using planning, recall of steps that worked in similar situations before, or inference when the task is unfamiliar. A second key feature is that thinking is strictly an internal mental process — it cannot be observed directly the way behaviour can. A chess player who sits still for several minutes before making a move is clearly thinking, but an observer cannot see the thinking itself; it can only be inferred, and usually only once the player's next move reveals something about the strategy being weighed. This is an important methodological point for psychology: thinking has to be studied indirectly, through what a person does, says, or produces, rather than through direct observation.

Thinking rests on two basic building blocks: mental images, which are picture-like internal representations of a sensory experience (recalling a street visited long ago, or picturing a cat sitting in a tree), and concepts, which are mental representations of categories that group together objects, ideas or events sharing common properties (recognising a new object as 'a dog' or 'a fruit'). Together, these two building blocks let a person manipulate information through further mental operations — abstracting, reasoning, imagining, solving problems, judging and deciding — which is why thinking is described as the foundation on which every other cognitive process in this chapter is ultimately built.