‘Does a rock fall faster than a feather?’* The question is an example of one where our instinct is overtaken by learning. 

Professor Michelle Ellefson is Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education, running the INSTRUCT Lab (Implementing New Student Thinking Resources Using Cognitive Theory).

Her current research projects focus on the role of executive functions in school achievement and how children's reasoning about causes and effects impacts how they think about scientific phenomena. 

“We look at thinking reasoning skills and how they change or improve from childhood to adolescence and into adulthood,” Michelle says.

“We're trying to look at how some of our cognitive skills help or even hinder us in dealing with those concepts that don't match our intuitions.”

*The answer (of course), is no – a feather and a rock fall at the same rate, but air resistance is among the factors which slows the descent of the feather.

The example of a rock or feather is a classic.

Michelle adds: “It's the sort of thing that even when we learn it in science, the residual of that naive idea hangs out. And when we're faced with this notion of two objects and which object will fall faster, we tend to always choose the heavy object.

“In many ways what science does, is it moves humans beyond our normal intuitions. In my lab we don't necessarily do the work on how to do that – there are other people who do – but what we're really interested in is what skills we need to move ourselves past it.

“There's something that's happening as you're trying to grapple with complex ideas and we're trying to understand what that is because we think that that would help to inform ways that we might both improve these skills and improve learning.” 

Michelle’s research is interdisciplinary, working alongside academics in psychology, linguistics, psychiatry and the clinical school, approaching similar questions about the development of thinking skills in different ways. Michelle’s lab uses an iterative process, pairing laboratory-based research with classroom learning and curriculum development, in order to better understand mechanisms responsible for cognitive development and to leverage that understanding to improve educational practice. She is a PI for the Centre for Lifelong Learning & Individualised Cognition, which is part of Cambridge Centre for Advanced Research and Education (CARES) collaborative network in Singapore.

“One of the things that's quite exciting about being in Cambridge is that there are so many people who research on executive functions, but they do it from so many different angles,” Michelle adds.

“You really get a sense of what's innovative from those different techniques and then you can think about how that applies to the work that you're doing.”

Educational research has traditionally relied upon data from developed nations, cities and towns. Reaching less studied populations, providing tasks where the participants understand the premise, not relying on language or computer knowledge, for example, is an aim of Michelle’s work. It means the paper – OSF | Age and gender effects on the development of executive function skills: A multisite study of school-aged children and adolescents – is important.

“We still have to do further work to reach samples that our particular tasks don't reach so that we can kind of understand all children have the same potential,” she adds. “They're all growing, they're all getting better and that's important in terms of our view of childhood and adolescence.”

Another study from Michelle and her group is entitled The roles of switching and inhibition in adult counterintuitive scientific thinking (Cognition, 268, March 2026). 

Michelle’s group showed switching, or cognitive flexibility, and inhibition, or ignoring distractions, work in tandem.

Michelle adds: “A lot of studies have suggested that it's just inhibition, it's just ignoring the false thing. But what we thought was actually you don't just ignore, you also have to switch your mindset from the intuitive to the scientific.

“Our study suggested that these switching skills play an important role in being able to navigate this kind of world where you have scientific facts that don't necessarily match our intuitive way of seeing the world.”

This is important when, for example, the general population must be informed about a global pandemic, such as Covid-19, and to use their own thoughts to consider the accuracy of sources, from the media, to politicians, to celebrities or social media influencers.

Michelle adds: “From a big picture, why I'm also interested in this is how do we help even adults continue to engage with these big problems, even when the science is well beyond their training, and it might challenge some of their intuitions.

“What kind of explanations do we need, at least most of us, to go, ‘okay, I get it, this is something we have to do’.”

It is more complex than a rock and a feather.