Editing Mental model (section)

===Principles of mental models===
Mental models are based on a small set of fundamental assumptions ([[axiom]]s), which distinguish them from other proposed representations in the [[psychology of reasoning]] (Byrne and Johnson-Laird, 2009). Each mental model represents a possibility. A mental model represents one possibility, capturing what is common to all the different ways in which the possibility may occur (Johnson-Laird and Byrne, 2002). Mental models are iconic, i.e., each part of a model corresponds to each part of what it represents (Johnson-Laird, 2006). Mental models are based on a principle of truth: they typically represent only those situations that are possible, and each model of a possibility represents only what is true in that possibility according to the proposition. However, mental models can represent what is false, temporarily assumed to be true, for example, in the case of [[counterfactual conditionals]] and [[counterfactual thinking]] (Byrne, 2005).