Having read the material about functional fixedness, reflect back on your own personal experiences of a time when you suffered from an inability to solve a problem due to functional fixedness. Describe the problem, context, and the solution you eventually arrived at. Perhaps someone else needed to show you how to think outside the box, or perhaps you had a moment of enlightenment that enabled you to solve the problem. In addition to describing your own experience with functional fixedness, research an article on functional fixedness and respond to the following:

• What factors contribute to functional fixedness?
• What factors make it easier to overcome functional fixedness?
• How might functional fixedness be related to perception?