Imagination is necessary for scientific practice, yet there are no in vivo sociological studies on the ways that imagination is taught, thought of, or evaluated by scientists. This article begins to remedy this by presenting the results of a qualitative study performed on two systems biology laboratories. I found that the more advanced a participant was in their scientific career, the more they valued imagination. Further, positive attitudes toward imagination were primarily due to the perceived role of imagination in problem-solving. (...) But not all problem-solving episodes involved clear appeals to imagination, only maximally specific problems did. This pattern is explained by the presence of an implicit norm governing imagination use in the two labs: only use imagination on maximally specific problems, and only when all other available methods have failed. This norm was confirmed by the participants, and I argue that it has epistemological reasons in its favour. I also found that its strength varies inversely with career stage, such that more advanced scientists do (and should) occasionally bring their imaginations to bear on more general problems. A story about scientific pedagogy explains the trend away from (and back to) imagination over the course of a scientific career. Finally, some positive recommendations are given for a more imagination-friendly scientific pedagogy. (shrink)

This article notes the convergence of recent thinking in neuroscience and grounded cognition regarding the way we understand mental representation and recollection: ideas are dynamic and multi-modal, actively created at the point of recall. Also, neurophysiologically, re-entrant signalling among cortical circuits allows non-conscious processing to support our deliberative thoughts and actions. The qualitative research we describe examines the exchanges occurring during semi-structured interviews with 360 children age 3–13, including 294 from New Zealand and 66 from China concerning their understanding of (...) the shape and motion of the Earth, Sun and Moon. We look closely at the relationships between what is revealed as children manipulate their own play-dough models and their apparent understandings of ESM concepts. In particular, we focus on the switching taking place between what is said, what is drawn and what is modelled. The evidence is supportive of Edelman’s view that memory is non-representational and that concepts are the outcome of perceptual mappings, a view which is also in accord with Barsalou’s notion that concepts are simulators or skills which operate consistently across several modalities. Quantitative data indicate that the dynamic structure of memory/concept creation is similar in both genders and common to the cultures/ethnicities compared and that repeated interviews in this longitudinal research lead to more advanced modelling skills and/or more advanced shape and motion concepts, the results supporting hypotheses. (shrink)