ABSTRACT
Everyday life provides people with countless opportunities for observing and interacting with objects in motion. For example, watching a baseball game, driving a car and even dropping a pencil involve encounters with moving objects. Thus, everyone presumably has some sort of knowledge about motion. However, it is by no means clear what form or forms this knowledge may take. Everyday experience may lead only to the acquisition of concrete facts about the behavior of specific objects in specific situations (e.g., when a moving billiard ball strikes a stationary ball head on, the moving ball often stops). Alternatively, experience may result in the induction of descriptive generalizations that summarize a variety of observations (e.g., moving objects eventually slow down and stop). Finally, experience might even lead to the development of implicit theories of motion that provide explanations for, as well as descriptions of, the behavior of moving objects (e.g., changes in the speed or direction of an object's motion are caused by external forces).
