To understand problem solving, and to discover the best problem solving stradegy for you, you must first understand what is going on in your brain during the whole problem solving process. And that means thinking about thought.
Now here's a sticky problem. How does one think about thought? How can a person accurately measure how they go about thinking a certain way about something? First, break up the thought process into a relationship between stimulus variables and actions. Next, figure out what that relationship is exactly. Psychologists have come up with several different analogies, or models, for the thought process.