Students hold a variety of initial (mis)conceptions that are inconsistent with scientific knowledge and hinder their physics learning. The initial (mis)conceptions could coexist with the scientific ones, even after a conceptual change. Inhibitory control may help overcome initial (mis)conceptions. This study investigated if and how inhibitory control can overcome position-velocity indiscrimination (PVI), a common kinematics misconception. We designed a negative priming paradigm with various prime-probe item pairs. College physics majors had to judge if the items describing the instant that two locomotives have the same velocity were correct. When congruent probes (same position-same velocity) were followed by incongruent primes (same position-different velocity), participants performed worse than when neutral primes (i.e., not passing points) were presented beforehand. The result verified a typical negative priming effect, indicating that inhibitory control is involved in overcoming the PVI misconception. Congruent probes preceded by incongruent primes implicitly triggering the PVI misperception had a lower negative priming effect than explicitly activating it. The results indicated that inhibitory control was needed to overcome the PVI misconception, and the explicit activation of the misconception required more inhibitory control.

Misconceptions coexisting with scientific understanding pose significant challenges in physics education. Inhibitory control may enable individuals to overcome interference from misconceptions. However, discerning the role of inhibitory control becomes intricate when the saliency of scientific- and misconception-related features varies in a problem. This study investigates the role of inhibitory control in overcoming such misconceptions when scientific and misconception-related features are similarly salient, particularly focusing on the range-time (range determines flight time) misconception. We adopted a negative priming (NP) paradigm with the eye-tracking technique in the study. Thirty-six college physics majors participated in the experiment. In the NP paradigm, the participants first compared the flight times in a neutral (same range) or incongruent (longer range, less flight time) primes and then completed the same task in a congruent (longer range, more flight time) probe. Results revealed longer reaction times for incongruent primes compared to neutral primes and longer reaction times to respond to congruent probes following incongruent primes than when neutral primes were present beforehand, suggesting that the inhibitory control may be involved in overcoming the interference from the range-time misconception. Moreover, the eye-tracking analysis highlighted an early overt attention to the salient misconception-related feature (longer range) during primes, along with additional attentional investment necessary to inhibit the range-time misconception. During probes, an early shift of attention away from the salient misconception-related feature and a greater investment of attention on processing the congruent probes after the incongruent primes than that after the neutral primes were observed, indicating a possible effect of the previous inhibitory control in the primes on the subsequent cognitive process on the probes. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the cognitive process underlying physics conceptual change and provide insights into physics education. Published by the American Physical Society 2024

Previous studies have suggested the effect of linguistic information on voice perception (e.g., the language-familiarity effect [LFE]). However, it remains unclear which type of specific information in speech contributes to voice perception, including acoustic, phonological, lexical, and semantic information. It is also underexamined whether the roles of these different types of information are modulated by the experimental paradigm (speaker discrimination vs. speaker identification). In this study, we conducted two experiments to investigate these issues regarding LFEs. Experiment 1 examined the roles of acoustic and phonological information in speaker discrimination and identification with forward and time-reversed Mandarin and Indonesian sentences. Experiment 2 further identified the roles of phonological, lexical, and semantic information with forward, word-scrambled, and reconstructed (consisting of pseudo-Mandarin words) Mandarin and forward Indonesian sentences. For Mandarin-only participants, in Experiment 1, speaker discrimination was more accurate for forward than reversed sentences, but there was no LFE in either sentence. Speaker identification was also more accurate for forward than reversed sentences, whereas there was an LFE for forward sentences. In Experiment 2, speaker discrimination was better for word-scrambled than reconstructed Mandarin sentences. Speaker identification was more accurate for forward and word-scrambled Mandarin sentences but less accurate for Mandarin reconstructed and forward Indonesian sentences. In general, the pattern of the results for Indonesian learners was the same as that for Mandarin-only speakers. These results suggest that different kinds of information support speaker discrimination and identification in native and unfamiliar languages. The LFE in speaker identification depends on both phonological and lexical information.