What Scientific Thinking Reveals About the Nature of Cognition

Abstract

The mental processes underlying scientific thinking and discovery have been investigated by cognitive psychologists, educators, and creativity researchers for over half a century. Despite this wide interest in scientific thinking, the field has been regarded as an intriguing offshoot of cognitive psychology that provides scientific cover stories for theories of analogy, concept acquisition, problem solving, and cognitive development rather than revealing something new about the nature of cognition. In this chapter, I will provide a summary of recent research that we have conducted on scientific thinking and I will argue that this research provides a new perspective on the ways that basic cognitive processes function. Thus, scientific thinking allows us to understand complex cognition and generate new models of basic cognitive processes that have eluded researchers using arbitrary and simple stimuli that are commonly used in psychology experiments. Rather than being an offshoot of mainstream cognitive theories, I will propose that scientific thinking is a paradigmatic example of cognition that reveals the key features of many basic cognitive processes. Recent research on the nature of scientific thinking has implications not only for theories of cognition, but also for both the content and practice of science education.