Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper I argue that conceptual knowledge has significant perceptual content, based upon evidence from studies of theory formation and from recent experimental work on learning in complex physical domains. I outline a theory of "perceptually grounded" conceptual knowledge, and briefly outline a computational model of learning about lasers, in which student's "qualitative' understanding of lasers rests primarily upon his perceptual experience in the domain.