title: Developmental changes in children's understanding of horizontal projectile motion.
abstract: This study investigated 5- to 13-year-old children's performance in solving horizontal projectile motion problems, in which they predicted the trajectory of a carried object released from a carrier in three different contexts. The results revealed that 5- and 8-year-olds' trajectory predictions were easily distracted by salient contextual features (e.g. the relative spatial locations between objects), whereas a proportion of 11- and 13-year-olds' performance suggested the engagement of the impetus concept in trajectory prediction. The impetus concept is a typical misconception of inertial motion that assumes that motion is caused by force. Children's performance across ages suggested that their naïve knowledge of projectile motion was neither well-developed and coherent nor completely fragmented. Instead, this study presented the dynamic process in which children with age gradually overcame the influences of contextual features and consistently used the impetus concept across motion problems.
authors.affiliation: Key Lab of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.|Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia, MO, USA.
authors.forename: Yi
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Mou
authors.affiliation: Key Lab of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Liqi
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.affiliation: Department of Human and Community Development, University of California-Davis, Davis, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Zhe
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Chen
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D002755:Choice Behavior; D032882:Comprehension; D005260:Female; D007722:Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009039:Motion Perception; D010825:Physics; D011340:Problem Solving
keywords: Horizontal projectile motion; Impetus theories; Misconception; Naïve physics