Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We discuss here conceptual change and the formation of robustlearning outcomes from the viewpoint of complex dynamicsystems, where students’ conceptions are seen as context de-pendent and multifaceted structures which depend on the con-text of their application. According to this view the conceptualpatterns (i.e. intuitive conceptions) may be robust in a cer-tain situation but are not formed, at last not as robust ones, inanother situation. The stability is then thought to arise dynami-cally in a variety of ways and not so much mirror rigid ontolog-ical categories or static intuitive conceptions. We use compu-tational modelling in understanding the generic dynamic andemergent features of that phenomenon. The model shows howcontext dependence, described here through structure of epis-temic landscape, leads to formation of context dependent ro-bust states. The sharply defined nature of these states makeslearning to appear as a progression of switches from state toanother, given appearance of conceptual change as switch fromone robust state to another.