ISBN:  Unavailable

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Page count: 60

The purpose of the two studies reported here was to develop an integrated model of the scientific reasoning process. Subjects were placed in a simulated scientific discovery context by first teaching them how to use an electronic device and then asking them to discover how a hitherto unencountered function worked. To do this task, subjects has to formulate hypotheses based on their prior knowledge, conduct experiments and evaluate the results of their experiments. In the first study, using 20 adult subjects, we identified two main strategies that subjects used to generate new hypotheses. One strategy was to search memory and the other was to generalize from the results of previous experiments. We described the former group as searching an hypothesis space, and the latter as searching an experiment space. In a second study with 10 adults, we investigated how subjects search the hypothesis space by instructing them to state all the hypotheses that they could think of prior to conducting any experiments. Following this phase, subjects were than allowed to conduct experiments. Subjects who could not think of the correct rule in the hypothesis generation phase discovered the correct rule only by generalizing from the results of experiments in the experimental phase. Keywords: Cognitive psychology, Scientific discover, Artificial intelligence, Machine learning, Reasoning, Human factors, Engineering. (JG).