Using Problem Solving From Cognitive Psychology To Analyze Inventive Step Examination Of Patent

In the patent examination, the judgment of inventive step is considered to beone of the most difficult judgments because it relates to two abstract conceptsincluding the person skilled in the art and technical teaching. Furthermore, manyoutstanding inventions may contain great perceptiveness and randomness, which isneither understood by normal people, nor easily evaluated and measured based onnormal logic. Sometimes, a patent examiner may not be able to stand at theinventor’s point of view and difficulty to objectively judge the inventiveness of thepatent application, thereby failing to grant some creative inventions with patents.Cognitive psychology is a discipline of psychological science to study cognitive andmental processing behind the behavior (including thinking, decision, reasoning, andmotivation and degree of emotion), which includes studying the characteristics ofcreativity and the operation of problem-solving, belonging to a discipline analyzinghow human can solve problems creatively. Therefore, cognitive psychology shouldprovide a lot of concepts and theories interlinking with the inventive step judgmentof patent examination. Therefore the present study tries to make a comparisonbetween the two different disciplines so as to find out their common points,following with retrieving some new ideas and thinking used for inventive stepexamination, ultimately improving the accuracy of the inventive step judgment. This paper is divided into five chapters:The first chapter begins with indicating the importance of inventive stepexamination of patent towards the society, mentions about the judgment methodregarding inventive step examination, and then points out the problems frequentlyencountered such as the subjectivity of inventive step judgment, judgment oftechnical teaching, mistake of ex post facto analysis and ignorance of considering theinvention as a whole.The second chapter provides a brief introduction regarding problem solving andcreativity of the cognitive psychology, following with elaborating the key andimportant concepts. Several classic testing questions in the field are disclosed. Thecommon points between the inventive step examination and cognitive psychologyare raised out.The third chapter is to analyze several creative patents based on the point ofview of cognitive psychology, and find out which features the patented inventionshave.The fourth chapter relates to inventive step examination case studies. Variouspatent examination cases, divided into five categories including technical solution,technical problem, technical field, technical effect, and lack of inventiveness, areanalyzed respectively through the stand point of cognitive psychology.The fifth chapter provides suggestions on how to enhance the accuracy of theinventive step examination, based on the concepts discussed and case analysis fromthe above chapters.