Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper presents a conceptual framework that integrates studies on scientific reasoning that have been conducted with different age subjects and across different experimental tasks. Traditionally, different aspects of scientific reasoning have been emphasized in studies with different aged subjects, and the different literatures are somewhat unconnected. However, this separation leads to a disjointed view of the development of scientific reasoning, and it leaves unexplained certain adult behaviors in very difficult scientific reasoning contexts. In this paper we attempt to integrate these three approaches into a single framework that describes the process of scientific reasoning as a search in an hypothesis space and an experiment space. We will present the results from a variety of studies conducted with preschool, elementary school, and adult subjects, and will show how differences in performance can be viewed as differences in the knowledge and strategies used to search the two spaces. Finally, we will present evidence showing that, in sufficiently challenging situations, adults exhibit deficits of the same sort that young children exhibit, even though one might have expected that these developmental milestones were long since passed.