What Have Psychologists (And Others) Discovered About the Process of Scientific Discovery?

We describe four major approaches to the study of science–historical accounts of scientific discoveries, psychological experiments with nonscientists working on tasks related to scientific discoveries, direct observation of ongoing scientific laboratories, and computational modeling of scientific discovery processes–by viewing them through the lens of the theory of human problem solving. We compare and contrast the different approaches, indicate their complementarities, and provide examples from each approach that converge on a set of principles of scientific discovery.

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