Inhibitory control involvement in overcoming the position-velocity indiscrimination misconception among college physics majors

Abstract

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.