Mental model

The term for this concept was coined in 1943 by Kenneth Craik, who suggested that the mind constructs "small-scale models" of reality that it uses to anticipate events.

Elsewhere, it is used to refer to the "mental model" theory of reasoning developed by Philip Johnson-Laird and Ruth M. J. Byrne.

The term mental model is believed to have originated with Kenneth Craik in his 1943 book The Nature of Explanation.

He has only selected concepts, and relationships between them, and uses those to represent the real system (Forrester, 1971).Philip Johnson-Laird published Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference and Consciousness in 1983.

In the same year, Dedre Gentner and Albert Stevens edited a collection of chapters in a book also titled Mental Models.

Since then, there has been much discussion and use of the idea in human-computer interaction and usability by researchers including Donald Norman and Steve Krug (in his book Don't Make Me Think).

Mental models are based on a small set of fundamental assumptions (axioms), which distinguish them from other proposed representations in the psychology of reasoning (Byrne and Johnson-Laird, 2009).

The ease with which reasoners can make deductions is affected by many factors, including age and working memory (Barrouillet, et al., 2000).

Mental models, in popular science parlance, have been described as "deeply held images of thinking and acting".

[5] Experimental studies carried out in weightlessness[11] and on Earth using neuroimaging [12] showed that humans are endowed with a mental model of the effects of gravity on object motion.

Mental models affect the way that people work with information, and also how they determine the final decision.