Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Intuitive explanations for natural phenomena are typically our default explanations, even after we have learned more accurate, scientific explanations (Shtulman & Valcarcel, 2012). The current study examined whether priming students with scientific images improves their ability to verify counterintuitive scientific statements, like “bacteria need nutrients” and “bubbles have weight.” Participants (100 college undergraduates) verified scientific statements interspersed with images relevant to the predicates of those statements; the images depicted either schematic diagrams (scientific primes) or everyday scenes (intuitive primes). Scientific primes increased the accuracy of participants’ responses, relative to intuitive primes, but not the speed of those responses, indicating that scientific primes facilitate a preference for scientific ideas over intuitive ones but do not eliminate the initial conflict between them.