Brain activations associated with scientific reasoning: a literature review

Coexistence of Misconceptions and Scientific Conceptions in Chemistry Professors: A Mental Chronometry and fMRI Study

“…In all the studies that we referred to in the preceding four paragraphs, the general conclusion was similar: in the production of correct or expert answers, evidence of conflict was recorded. This conflict is generally argued as evidence of the persistence of the initial conceptions in participants' resolution processes, because it is the presence and the activation (conscious or not) of those conceptions that interfere in the resolution process, trigger temporary conflict and eventually require inhibitory control (Nenciovici et al, 2019;Vaughn et al, 2020). Thus, the activation of inhibitory control is considered a good indication of the coexistence of multiple conceptions in a single mind, and thus supports the coexistence/persistence claim.…”

“…While these results do not completely contradict the possibility of coexistence (frontal regions activated to respond accurately), the conclusions of the authors pointed to working memory and semantic retrieval, rather than inhibitory control. While one could attribute these results to the nature of the task (visual vs. "not based on experience " Nelson et al, 2007, in the section "Discussion"), it remains difficult to hypothesize about the absence of a typical inhibitory signature, since we have few details about precisely how the study was conducted.…”

“…Yet it is also possible to find results that come to somewhat divergent conclusions. For example, an fMRI study that compared the brain activity of novices and experts in chemistry was conducted by Nelson et al (2007). This study used a task in which participants had to choose between correct representations of evaporation (molecules remaining intact) and incorrect ones (molecules breaking apart).…”

The Impact of High School Life Science Teachers’ Subject Matter Knowledge and Knowledge of Student Misconceptions on Students’ Learning

“…For example, under time pressure, even professional scientists start to reveal intuitive misconceptions (Goldberg and Thompson-Schill, 2009;Kelemen et al, 2013;Shtulman and Harrington, 2016). Functional magnetic resonance images of learners' and experts' brains indicate that there is a need to (subconsciously) inhibit a tendency to revert to prior misconceptions in order to give the correct answer (Foisy et al, 2015;Lubin et al, 2016;Mareschal, 2016;Nenciovici et al, 2018Nenciovici et al, , 2019Wang, 2018;Mason et al, 2019). It is possible that teachers with KOSM paid more attention to existing and potential misconceptions with their students, and once their students elucidated and found their ideas unproductive, they could more easily inhibit them and start to reason out of their SMK (which is when teachers' SMK starts to have effects).…”

Changes in students’ mental models from computational modeling of gene regulatory networks

“…Overall, this suggests a replacement of generic terms for context-specific terms rather than addition of new context-specific terms as modifiers to a generic model. This highlights the variation in knowledge building as new and existing knowledge are actively integrated (Nenciovici et al 2019). The post conceptual models captured the process whereby students reinforced some relationships and structures and replaced some structures with lac-specific structures; at the same time, they have removed incorrect connections and improved the quality of other relationships.…”