The article, "Using Animations in Identifying General Chemistry Students' Misconceptions and Evaluating Their Knowledge Transfer Relating to Particle Position in Physical Changes" (Smith and Villarreal, 2015), reports that a substantial proportion of undergraduate students expressed misconceived ideas regarding the motion of particles in liquids and solids. Identifying the productive resources that students hold, instead of trying to refute the erroneous idea as a whole, can be conducive for developing a more sophisticated and nuanced scientific understanding and reducing other erroneous conceptions. Through a reinterpretation of the study, this article claims that the illustration that accompanied the question in the study (Smith and Villarreal, 2015) was probably a major source for the seemingly incorrect reasoning that many students used. The author of this article argues that a closer look at the question and student answers reveals that students might have used productive "mechanistic" knowledge resources that can be beneficial for explaining complex scientific phenomena.