I'm on a mental model kick today.

"Mental models are psychological representations of real, hypothetical, or imaginary situations. They were first postulated by the Scottish psychologist Kenneth Craik (1943), who wrote that the mind constructs "small-scale models" of reality that it uses to anticipate events, to reason, and to underlie explanation. Like pictures in Wittgenstein’s (1922) "picture" theory of the meaning of language, mental models have a structure that corresponds to the structure of what they represent. They are accordingly akin to architects’ models of buildings, to molecular biologists’ models of complex molecules, and to physicists’ diagrams of particle interactions. Since Craik’s original insight, cognitive scientists have argued that the mind constructs mental models as a result of perception, imagination and knowledge, and the comprehension of discourse. They study how children develop such models, how to design artifacts and computer systems for which it is easy to acquire a model, how a model of one domain may serve as analogy for another domain, and how models engender thoughts, inferences, and feelings."
Link:Mental models: a gentle guide for outsiders

Categorized: Design , Experience Design

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