"A mental model is a cognitive construct that describes a person's understanding of a particular content domain in the world." (John Sown, "Conceptual Structures: Information Processing in Mind and Machine", 1984)
"Mental models are the mechanisms whereby humans are able to generate descriptions of system purpose and form, explanations of system functioning and observed system states, and predictions of future system states." (William B Rouse & Nancy M Morris, "On looking into the black box: Prospects and limits in the search for mental models", Psychological Bulletin (3), 1986)
"A mental model is a data structure, in a computational system, that represents a part of the real world or of a fictitious world. [...] Mental model is an appropriate term for the mental representations that underlie everyday reasoning about the world. To understand the everyday world is to have a theory of how it works." (Alan Granham, "Mental Models as Representations of Discourse and Text", 1987)
"A mental model is a representation of the content of a text that need bear no resemblance to any of the text's linguistic representations." (Alan Granham, "Mental Models as Representations of Discourse and Text", 1987)
"[…] a mental model is a mapping from a domain into a mental representation which contains the main characteristics of the domain; a model can be ‘run’ to generate explanations and expectations with respect to potential states." (Helmut Jungermann et al, "Mental models in risk assessment: Informing people about drugs", Risk Analysis 8 (1), 1988)
"A mental model is a knowledge structure that incorporates both declarative knowledge (e.g., device models) and procedural knowledge (e.g., procedures for determining distributions of voltages within a circuit), and a control structure that determines how the procedural and declarative knowledge are used in solving problems (e.g., mentally simulating the behavior of a circuit)." (Barbara Y White & John R Frederiksen, "Causal Model Progressions as a Foundation for Intelligent Learning Environments", Artificial Intelligence 42, 1990)
"’Mental models’ are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. [...] Mental models are deeply held internal images of how the world works, images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. Very often, we are not consciously aware of our mental models or the effects they have on our behavior." (Peter Senge, "The Fifth Discipline", 1990)
"The mental model, in turn, can be considered as a syntactic language of thought whose semantic interpretation is provided by the actual world. In this sense, a person's beliefs are true to the extent that they correspond to the world." (William J Rapaport, "Understanding Understanding: Syntactic Semantics and Computational Cognition", Philosophical Perspectives Vol. 9, 1995)
"[A mental model] is a relatively enduring and accessible, but limited, internal conceptual representation of an external system (historical, existing, or projected) whose structure is analogous to the perceived structure of that system." (James K Doyle & David N Ford, "Mental models concepts revisited: Some clarifications and a reply to Lane", System Dynamics Review 15 (4), 1999)
"In broad terms, a mental model is to be understood as a dynamic symbolic representation of external objects or events on the part of some natural or artificial cognitive system." (Gert Rickheit & Lorenz Sichelschmidt, "Mental Models: Some Answers, Some Questions, Some Suggestions", 1999)
"A mental model is a representation of some domain or situation that supports understanding, reasoning, and prediction." (D Gentner, "Psychology of Mental Models" [in "International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences"], 2001)
"A mental model is conceived […] as a knowledge structure possessing slots that can be filled not only with empirically gained information but also with ‘default assumptions’ resulting from prior experience. These default assumptions can be substituted by updated information so that inferences based on the model can be corrected without abandoning the model as a whole. Information is assimilated to the slots of a mental model in the form of ‘frames’ which are understood here as ‘chunks’ of knowledge with a well-defined meaning anchored in a given body of shared knowledge." (Jürgen Renn, "Before the Riemann Tensor: The Emergence of Einstein’s Double Strategy", "The Universe of General Relativity" Ed. by A.J. Kox & Jean Eisenstaedt, 2005)
"A mental model is a mental representation that captures what is common to all the different ways in which the premises can be interpreted." (Carsten Held et al, "Mental Models and the Mind", 2006)
"[...] mental models are only an abstraction of reality and at best an oversimplification." (Jamshid Gharajedaghi, "Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity", 2011)
"We all have mental models: the lens through which we see the world that drive our responses to everything we experience." (Elizabeth Thornton, "Learn to Be an Objective Leader without Losing Everything", 2015)
No comments:
Post a Comment