Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study aimed to develop a Thought Experiment External-izer (TE-ext) and to apply it in order to observe barriers toproblem solving. TE-ext enables students to visualize a prob-lem situation. Users of TE-ext can implement changes in thesituation and see the result as an animation. Experimentaluse of TE-ext identified three barriers to conducting an effec-tive thought experiment (TE). First, participants tended not tochange the situation from the original one; second, incorrect orinappropriate knowledge was applied to the situation; third, theparticipants did not apply the results of their TE to other situa-tions. These factors prevented participants from rejecting theirinitial incorrect model and finding a new one through TEs.