Editing Mental model (section)

==History==
The term ''mental model'' is believed to have originated with [[Kenneth Craik]] in his 1943 book ''The Nature of Explanation''.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Nersessian|first1=Nancy J.|author-link=Nancy J. Nersessian|title=In the Theoretician's Laboratory: Thought Experimenting as Mental Modeling|journal=PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association|date=1992|volume=1992|issue=2|pages=291–301|url=http://www.cc.gatech.edu/aimosaic/faculty/nersessian/papers/in-the-theoreticians-laboratory.pdf|access-date=17 July 2014|quote=The contemporary notion that mental modelling plays a significant role in human reasoning was formulated, initially, by Kenneth Craik in 1943.|doi=10.1086/psaprocbienmeetp.1992.2.192843|s2cid=141149408}}
</ref><ref>{{cite journal|last1=Staggers|first1=Nancy|last2=Norcio|first2=A.F.|title=Mental models: concepts for human-computer interaction research|journal=International Journal of Man-Machine Studies|date=1993|volume=38|issue=4|pages=587–605|doi=10.1006/imms.1993.1028|url=http://userpages.umbc.edu/~norcio/papers/1993/Staggers-MM-IJMMS.pdf|quote=Although Johnson-Laird (1989) is generally credited with coining the term mental model, the history of the concept may be traced to Craik's (1943) work entitled ''The Nature of Explanation''.|access-date=17 July 2014}}</ref> [[:fr:Georges-Henri Luquet|Georges-Henri Luquet]] in ''Le dessin enfantin'' (Children's drawings), published in 1927 by Alcan, Paris, argued that children construct internal models, a view that influenced, among others, child psychologist [[Jean Piaget]].

[[Jay Wright Forrester]] defined general mental models thus:
<blockquote>The image of the world around us, which we carry in our head, is just a model. Nobody in his head imagines all the world, government or country. He has only selected concepts, and relationships between them, and uses those to represent the real system (Forrester, 1971).</blockquote>

[[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''.<ref>[http://www.lauradove.info/reports/mental%20models.htm "Mental models"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110518220333/http://www.lauradove.info/reports/mental%20models.htm |date=2011-05-18 }}, report at www.lauradove.info.</ref> The first line of their book explains the idea further: "One function of this chapter is to belabor the obvious; people's views of the world, of themselves, of their own capabilities, and of the tasks that they are asked to perform, or topics they are asked to learn, depend heavily on the conceptualizations that they bring to the task." (see the book: ''[[Mental Models (Gentner-Stevens book)|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]]''). [[Walter Kintsch]] and [[Teun A. van Dijk]], using the term ''situation model'' (in their book ''Strategies of Discourse Comprehension'', 1983), showed the relevance of mental models for the production and comprehension of [[discourse]].

[[Charlie Munger]] popularized the use of multi-disciplinary mental models for making business and investment decisions.<ref>[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqzcCfUglws "The Psychology of Human Misjudgement"], speech by Charlie Munger</ref>