[Frame for Work] The Concept of Mental Models

Is there a single unified theory of “Mental Models”? No!

Photo by omid haqsheno on Unsplash

In contemporary cognitive science, the concept of “Mental Models” is associated with Mental Representation and real-world phenomena. The historical development of the concept of Mental Models has been reviewed by Nancy J. Nersessian in her 2008 book Creating Scientific Concepts.

• 1943, Kenneth Craik hypothesized that in many instances people reason by carrying out thought experiments on internal models of physical situations, where a model is a structural, behavioral, or functional analogue to a real-world phenomenon (Craik 1943)…Craik made this proposal at the height of the behaviorist approach in psychology, and so it received little notice.
• Since the early 1980s, a “mental models framework” has developed in a large segment of cognitive science. This explanatory framework posits models as organized units of mental representation of knowledge that are employed in various cognitive tasks, including reasoning, problem solving, and discourse comprehension.
• In the early 1980s, several largely independent strands of research emerged introducing the theoretical notions of “mental model” and “mental modeling” into the cognitive science literature.
• One strand introduced the notion to explain the effects of semantic…