CAREER: Understanding the Role of Explanation in Cognition

职业：理解解释在认知中的作用

• 批准号: 1056712
• 负责人: Tania Lombrozo
• 金额: $ 55.1万
• 依托单位: University of California-Berkeley
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-04-15 至 2018-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1056712&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Understanding; Role; Explanation; Cognition

The proposed research develops and tests an account of explanation to better understand its role in cognition. The central hypothesis is that explanations have certain properties that serve as a mechanism for the development of knowledge structures that are useful in the sense that they support generalization, prediction, and intervention. The primary question that this research asks is how explanation might contribute to the formation of such knowledge. Explanations are evaluated on the basis of several explanatory virtues - properties that increase the perceived quality of explanations. The proposed research considers two cues: an explanation's simplicity and its breadth or ability to unify diverse phenomena. Both are invoked in science and philosophy of science, and are justified on normative grounds within statistic and computer science. The study describes three kinds of studies. Lab studies that will help identify features of preferred explanations, a more naturalistic study of explanations that are sought and produced via an online environment, and an experiment to compare conditions in which learners are prompted to generate an explanation or listen to facts. The goal is to understand both the function and content of explanations.

拟议的研究开发和测试解释的帐户，以更好地理解其在认知中的作用。核心假设是，解释具有某些属性，这些属性可以作为知识结构发展的机制，这些知识结构在支持概括、预测和干预的意义上是有用的。本研究提出的主要问题是解释如何有助于这种知识的形成。 解释是根据几个解释的优点来评估的--这些特性可以提高解释的感知质量。拟议中的研究考虑了两个线索：一个解释的简单性和它的广度或统一不同现象的能力。两者都在科学和科学哲学中被引用，并且在统计和计算机科学中的规范性基础上被证明是合理的。该研究描述了三种类型的研究。实验室研究，这将有助于确定首选解释的特征，通过在线环境寻求和产生的解释的更自然的研究，以及一个实验，以比较促使学习者产生解释或听取事实的条件。目的是理解解释的功能和内容。