Mental Models – History

The term “Mental model” was first proposed by Scottish psychologist Kenneth Craik (1943) in his book, The Nature of Explanation. He believed that the mind constructs “small-scale models” of reality that it uses to anticipate events, to reason, and to underlie explanation. The concept was not explored by him much due to his untimely death the idea was left open for others to explore it.

According to Laird (2004), there were few precursors Lord Kelvin and Boltzmann who predicted the existence of mental models and coined some theories around it. Boltzmann wrote:

“The task of theory consists in constructing an image of external world that exists purely internally and must be our guiding star in thought and experiment; that is in completing, as it were, the thinking process and carrying out globally what on a small scale occurs within us whenever we form an idea”. (Boltzmann, 1899)

But the theory’s intellectual grandfather is Charles Sanders Pierce (Johnson-Laird, 2004). He first postulated (1896) in his theory about deduction that reasoning is a process by which a human “examines the state of things asserted in the premises, forms a diagram of that state of things, perceives in the parts of the diagram relations not explicitly mentioned in the premises, satisfies itself by mental experiments upon the diagram that these relations would always subsist, or at least would do so in a certain proportion of cases, and concludes their necessary, or probable, truth.”

In simple words, he explains that while we try to make sense of something or conclude about a situation in our daily activity we try to deduce two or more propositions (assumptions) which are called premises and form a diagram or visual images (model) and also try to identify connections between the entities (models). At the same time confirms the validity of the formed diagram (model/s) by performing mental experiments for a probable truth.

Kurtz explains mental models may be (1) An image, (2) A script, (3) A set of related mental models, (4) A controlled vocabulary, or (5) A set of assumptions. According to him a mental model may contain aspects of one or more of these types of models. A user may have an image of the look of an interface, a script of the process to be followed when completing a task, knowledge of the vocabulary the system uses, and assumptions about the behaviour of the system (Kurtz, 2004). The properties can co-occur: a photograph with verbal labels for its parts is iconic (diagram), indexical (connection) and symbolic (verbal description) (Johnson-Laird, 2004).

Many recent researchers have used mental models to explain aspects of thinking including problem solving, inductive learning, and human-machine interaction. The concept of mental theory became popular in cognitive science is largely due to Philip Johnson-Laird, who has used it extensively in explanations of deductive and other kinds of inference as well as many aspects of language understanding (Kurtz, 2004). Most of the literatures in mental models and thinking reasoning have been documented by him along with his associates.

Similarly Norman (1983) was one of the first attempts to create a terminology for a human-computer interaction theory of mental models where he introduced the idea of there being different models of a system (Kurtz, 2004). He suggested:

1. Target system: A system user is using and learning.
2. Conceptual model: Invented by teachers, designers as an accurate representation of the system.
3. The system image: The impression system portrays to the users.
4. Scientist’s conceptualisation of the mental model: A model of a model. In other words scientist’s assumption of user’s mental model.

References:

Johnson-Laird, P. N. 2004. The history of mental models. In: MANKTELOW, K. & CHUNG, M. C. (eds.)Psychology of Reasoning: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives. New York: Psychology Press.

Kurtz, A. 2004. Mental Models – A Theory Critique [Online]. The Open University. Available:http://mcs.open.ac.uk/yr258/ment_mod/ [Accessed].