PHYSICS
Chapter Three:
EXPERIMENTAL STUDY
HUMAN CONCEPTION OF MECHANICAL MOTION
In the last Chapter, we have seen that much research in recent years try to answer the question whether people represent the dynamic properties of the physical world. My first experiment was intended to make a preliminary determination of whether mechanical information is treated or represented differently from non-mechanical information by the cognitive system. In other words, we hypothesize that mechanical events as conceived by the cognitive system follow certain mechanical constraints or principles which would not be followed by non-mechanical conceptions, for example, purely visual conceptions.
EXPERIMENT 1
Experiment 2 further investigates the nature of cognitive representations of mechanical motion. We will examine the representation of mechanical motion in terms of mass and speed, the mechanical components of mechanical motion. We hope to characterize in more precise terms the mechanical contraint found in Experiment 1.