Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Mechanistic information can be characterized as theinteracting causal components underlying a phenomenon - inshort, how something works. Children and adults arenotoriously poor at learning, remembering, and applyingmechanistic information, so it comes as no surprise that thewisdom of teaching mechanism has come under increasingscrutiny in science education. However, while a rich memoryfor mechanistic details may be out of the average student’sgrasp, we argue that exposure to mechanism does not leavestudents empty-handed. Instead, it refines their intuitionsabout science and the world in significant ways. For thecurrent study, we focused on one kind of intuition inparticular: beliefs about causal complexity. Children ages 6-11 rated the complexity of a heart and a lock and were thengiven either mechanistic or non-mechanistic informationabout them. Afterwards, they were asked if their intuitionsabout complexity had changed and if so by how much. Threeweeks later, children were asked again about their intuitionsabout complexity. Crucially, children who were givenmechanistic information demonstrated a significantly greatershift in their assessments of complexity for both the heart anddoor lock compared to their counterparts who were givennon-mechanistic information. This contradicts the notion thatmechanism provides learners with few benefits while alsodemonstrating how mechanism can be a powerful force inshaping children’s intuitions.