Differences in Brain Activation Between Novices and Experts in Science During a Task Involving a Common Misconception in Electricity

fMRI comparison of science experts vs novices (exact n not obtained from the record read)

Adults - science experts (physics/science-trained) versus novices, evaluating simple electric circuits.

Small-sample neuroimaging with a non-randomised expert/novice contrast, so grade D as evidence about instruction - it cannot tell us what teaching does, only what the endpoint of teaching looks like inside a trained head. The task exploits a specific, well-documented naive-physics misconception (that a bulb needs only one wire to the battery, or symmetrically that current is consumed by the bulb): participants judge whether circuits work. The theoretical payload is the contrast between two hypotheses that behavioural data cannot separate - REPLACEMENT (the misconception is gone) versus INHIBITION (the misconception is intact and is being suppressed). Read at abstract depth only.

Experts, more than novices, activated brain areas involved in INHIBITION when evaluating electric circuits in which a bulb lights up despite being connected to the battery by only one wire. The authors' conclusion is the one that matters for this topic: "experts may still have a misconception encoded in the neural networks of their brains that must be inhibited in order to answer scientifically". Expertise in science is therefore characterised not by the absence of the naive conception but by the capacity to override it - which is the neural counterpart of Shtulman & Valcarcel's response-time result and has the same implication for instruction: a post-test showing the correct answer does not license the inference that the misconception is gone.

Not the operative confound, but the expert/novice contrast is fully self-selected - people who become science experts differ from those who do not in ways that include ability, so the group difference in inhibitory recruitment is not attributable to instruction.

Same finding reproduced in a different domain and a harder sample by the same research group (Potvin et al. 2020, chemistry professors) and converges with the behavioural evidence in Shtulman & Valcarcel 2012 and with fMRI work on physics PhDs.