Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Function – what a thing is for – and mechanism – how a thing's parts interact to make it work – are considered by cognitive psychologists and philosophers of science to be integrally related despite people's acute sensitivity to their differences. Here, we set out to better characterize lay adults' intuitions about functional and mechanistic knowledge (Study 1). Then, we use learning studies to investigate to what degree these intuitions accurately capture functional and mechanistic cognition (Studies 2, 3). While some intuitions (e.g., that mechanism is more difficult to learn than function) are supported by these learning studies, others (e.g., that function should precede mechanism in explanations) are not. Possible reasons for matches and mismatches are explored.