Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Students enter educational settings with complex and well-established intuitive conceptual understandings of theworld, which have important educational consequences. In biology, intuitive thinking can be characterized in terms of cogni-tive construals (anthropocentric, teleological, and essentialist thinking, Coley & Tanner, 2015). We examined relations betweenintuitive thinking and biological misconceptions, and how formal biology education might influence such relations. 137 bi-ology and non-science majors completed measures of anthropocentric, teleological, and essentialist thinking, and indicatedagreement/disagreement with common misconceptions and explained their responses. Teleological thinking (but not anthro-pocentric or essentialist thinking) predicted teleological misconceptions. Anthropocentric and teleological thinking (but notessentialist thinking) predicted anthropocentric misconceptions. Agreement with essentialist misconceptions was unrelated tointuitive thinking. Similar patterns for non-majors and majors suggests formal biology education may have little influence onrelations between intuitive reasoning and misconceptions. These findings demonstrate a clear impact of intuitive thinking onlearning biology at the university level.