Category Change in the Absence of Falsifying Feedback

Category Change in the Absence of Falsifying Feedback Jared T. Ramsburg (jramsb2@uic.edu) Stellan Ohlsson (stellan@uic.edu) University of Illinois at Chicago Department of Psychology (MC 285) 1007 West Harrison Street Chicago, Illinois, 60607-7137 Abstract Many conceptual change theories posit that change occurs when the learner becomes dissatisfied with the current conception (Ohlsson, 2011; Strike & Posner, 1992). A necessary component of dissatisfaction is falsifying feedback. The present experiments investigate whether participants exposed to a novel method for eliminating the ability to directly falsify a misconception will still be able to recategorize compared to participants that can directly falsify. The results suggest that direct falsification of a misconception is not necessary for recategorization, and that direct falsification may slow the learning process. Implications are discussed. Keywords: Learning, monotonic change. recategorization, feedback, non- Introduction Both common sense and past research have assumed that conceptual change in particular and non-monotonic cognitive change in general is driven by a person’s dissatisfaction with his or her current conception (Ohlsson, 2011). Dissatisfaction is in turn caused by falsifying information and experiences that are inconsistent with the current conception. Without falsification a person would presumably lack motivation to change (Chi, 2005; Chi, 2008; Chi & Brem, 2009; Gopnik & Wellman, 2012; Slotta & Chi, 2006; Strike & Posner, 1982, 1992). But once dissatisfaction has set in, the learner is ready to search for an alternative conception (Elio & Pelletier, 1997; Strike & Posner, 1982, 1992; Chi & Ohlsson, 2005; Ozdemir & Clark, 2007). The theme of falsification first became dominant in the history of science via the works of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, but it has since spread to all aspects of knowledge change. For example, Strike and Posner’s (1982) claimed that students in a science classroom must be dissatisfied with their current conception before they are ready to learn a new conception. Moreover, dissatisfaction must surpass the threshold at which accommodation supersedes assimilation. The threshold is surpassed by the accretion of falsifying pieces of information that accumulate until the discrepancy cannot be ignored. Similarly, the Theory-Theory posits that the knowledge revision process takes place when dissatisfaction with the current conception reaches an individual’s threshold for conceptual change in the course of cognitive development (Gopnik & Wellman, 2012). As a final example, the Categorical Shift Theory describes conceptual change as a process that requires one to abandon or reject prior misconceptions via the recognition of differences between two or more general categories (Chi, 2005; Chi & Brem, 2009). Failure to filter information through an existing knowledge base leads to dissatisfaction with the current conception. Dissatisfaction leads to a search for an alternative knowledge structure capable of accommodating the new information. In short, these and other theories of cognitive change assume that dissatisfaction is a necessary prerequisite for cognitive change in children, students, and both lay adults and scientists. However, both common sense and psychological research agree that although people respond to falsifying information by trying to reduce the cognitive dissonance it causes, they tend to process the falsifying information in such a way as to minimize its impact on current knowledge (Ohlsson, 2011). If so, why should we believe that falsifying information is a necessary component of conceptual change? In contrast to the theories mentioned above, the Resubsumption Theory claims that conceptual change can occur even in the absence of falsification of a person’s current conception. This is possible when the learner possesses two alternative theories that apply to the same case or phenomenon. Change from one theory to the other occurs through competitive evaluation on the basis of cognitive utility rather than truth or falsity (Ohlsson, 2009). Competitive evaluation triggers a change by revealing that the alternative theory is more applicable in a given instance. In the current study, we used the re-categorization paradigm (Cosejo, Oesterreich & Ohlsson, 2009) to create a situation in which the participants needed to change a newly learned definition a category into a different definition of the same category in the absence of information that falsified the latter. Specifically, the participants learned how to categorize a novel set of stimuli through the standard procedure used in countless categorization experiments (Ashby & Maddox, 2005): view a potential category member, judge whether it is a member, receive feedback on the judgment, and go to the next trial. Once the participants showed that they had mastered the category, the category was changed without warning. To succeed, the learner had