Perceptual grouping affects students' propensity to make inferences consistent with their misconceptions

People have many incorrect beliefs about evolutionary relationships among living things, in part due to the prominence people place on observable similarities as indicators of such. Consider: People think that porpoises and whales are more closely related to manatees than to bison based on their shared aquatic habitat. Our research asked whether it is possible to combat misconceptions using compelling visual representations. Previous research found that the Gestalt principles of perceptual grouping affect reasoning with evolutionary trees. We explored the potential of designing such trees as a "myth buster" tool to target biological misconceptions. More specifically, we tested the hypothesis that students would be less likely to make misconception-based inferences when the perceptual grouping of the tree branches strongly, as opposed to weakly, contradicts the misconception. The results of Experiment 1 showed that it is possible to manipulate perceptual grouping such that the tree structures are viewed as more versus less contradictory to a targeted misconception. Experiments 2 and 3 found that grouping manipulations reduced students' propensity to make inferences consistent with their misconceptions for six misconceptions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).