Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study addressed the following three questions: (1) To what extent can people's naive, complex, and idiosyncratic knowledge about a real physical domain be captured in a formal representation of an hypothesis space? (2) How does exposure to increasingly complex instances affect subjects' search through the hypothesis space? (3) What is the effect of feedback on hypothesis revision? Six adult subjects solved a series of physics problems involving buoyant forces and liquid displacement. An analysis of subjects' verbal protocols suggests: (1) Naive, complex and idiosyncratic knowledge can characterized by an hypothesis space and changes in that knowledge can then be described as a search through the hypothesis space; (2) People who receive feedback from experimental outcomes change their hypotheses and reach a higher level in the hypothesis space. Mere problem exposure, without feedback, did not lead to hypothesis revision.