A mental model is an explanation in someone's thought process for how something works in the real world. It is a kind of internal symbol or representation of external reality, hypothesised to play a major part in cognition. The idea is believed to have been originated by Kenneth Craik in his 1943 book The Nature of Explanation. After the early death of Craik in a bicycle accident, the idea was not elaborated on until much later. Two books, both titled Mental Models, appeared in 1983 [1]. One was by Philip Johnson-Laird, a psychology professor at Princeton University. The other was a collection of articles edited by Dedre Gentner and Albert Stevens. See Mental Models (Gentner-Stevens book). Since then there has been much discussion and use of the idea in human computer interaction and usability by people such as Donald Norman and by Steve Krug in his book Don't Make Me Think. These are just a couple of examples among many, many others. Look up Cognition on Wiktionary, the free dictionary The term cognition is used in several different loosely related ways. ... Kenneth Craik ( 1914- 1945) was a philosopher and psychologist who received his doctorate from Cambridge University in 1940. ... For other Princetons, see Princeton. ... Dedre Gentner is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University. ... Mental Models is the title of a book published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. ... Human-computer interaction (HCI) is the study of interaction between people (users) and computers. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Donald Norman is a professor emeritus of cognitive science at University of California, San Diego and a Professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University, but nowadays works mostly with cognitive science in the domain of usability engineering. ... Dont Make Me Think is a short and very easy to read book by Steve Krug. ...
Cognitive psychology is the psychological science which studies cognition, the mental processes that are hypothesised to underlie behavior. ... An abstract model (or conceptual model) is a theoretical construct that represents physical, biological or social processes, with a set of variables and a set of logical and quantitative relationships between them. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...
External links
The Interaction-Design.org Encyclopedia entry on Mental Models and HCI/Interaction Design
Gentner and Stevens (1983) argues that because a mentalmodel is a model that evolves in the mind of a user as he or she learns and interacts with a computer system, the mentalmodel will represent the structure and internal relationships of a system.
To be able to categorise the mentalmodel of the concept "atom", one should look at the historical development of the model of an atom and the mentalmodels scientists have formed of the atom over the years (Table 6).
The mentalmodels of the concept "Electricity" for 6 students have remained unchanged, while the changes in the mentalmodels of this concept for the other six students are highlighted in Table 11.
The slower processing of ambiguous sentences is one area where mentalmodel research is relevant to interaction design, as interaction designers are, among other things, interested in measures of learnability and ease of use.
In his book, he used mentalmodels to describe how a system is designed and implemented on the basis of the designer's mentalmodel.
Mentalmodels are what people really have in their heads and what guides their use of things.
Feeds |
Contact