Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study explores how scientific conceptualizations, such as partitioning of the brain into distinct regions, shape investigation. One hundred fifty-six undergraduate psychology students (novices) completed a science learning task in which they explored the behavioral functions of a fictional brain segment by conducting simplified neuroimaging and lesioning experiments on it. We investigated how the partitioning of the segment into regions influenced participants' experimental choices and learning outcomes by randomly seeding the brain regions for each participant. The participants exhibited conceptual influences on their experimentation: they preferred to explore the boundaries and prototypical--or "skeletal"--locations of the delineated regions. These conceptual biases significantly shaped learning outcomes; for example, participants were more successful at identifying signals near region boundaries. Additionally, participants demonstrated conceptual expectations that led them to associate a discovered signal with locations within one region rather than locations that straddled region boundaries. This research contributes to our understanding of how the scientific concepts affect scientific investigation.