Citation

Mou Y, Zhu L, Chen Z. Int. J. Psychol. 2014; 50(4): 256-264.

Affiliation

Key Lab of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China; Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia, MO, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, International Union of Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1002/ijop.12095

PMID

25187174

Abstract

This study investigated 5- to 13-year-old children's performance in solving horizontal projectile motion problems, in which they predicted the trajectory of a carried object released from a carrier in three different contexts. The results revealed that 5- and 8-year-olds' trajectory predictions were easily distracted by salient contextual features (e.g. the relative spatial locations between objects), whereas a proportion of 11- and 13-year-olds' performance suggested the engagement of the impetus concept in trajectory prediction. The impetus concept is a typical misconception of inertial motion that assumes that motion is caused by force. Children's performance across ages suggested that their naïve knowledge of projectile motion was neither well-developed and coherent nor completely fragmented. Instead, this study presented the dynamic process in which children with age gradually overcame the influences of contextual features and consistently used the impetus concept across motion problems.

Language: en