Mental model

A mental model is a representation of an object or a process in the mind of a living being. Since the existing information in the world are already heavily filtered and altered by the sensory organs and the brain, a mental model only a part, is always a " scaled-down " image of a part of reality. Nevertheless, the "good" mental models remain relevant aspects of reality, in particular its structure, then there are homomorphisms.

Term development

Ludwig Wittgenstein describes this idea in Section 2.1 of his Tractatus Logico - Philosophicus (1918 ): "We make to ourselves pictures of facts. The picture is a model of reality. The objects correspond in the picture elements of the image. " In 1927, he published Le dessin enfantin of Georges- Henri Luquet, in which he analyzes how children represent the world in their paintings. These contain very common "explanations" of the world, such as Cause-effect relationships. It can be concluded that children link their perceptions internally, arrange them in a meaningful with their internal model. Jean Piaget referred Luquets book as an important inspiration for his theory of mental logic ( 1958). As the inventor of the term mental model applies Kenneth Craik, who discussed the concept in 1943 in his book The Nature of Explanation in detail.

Psychological perspective

Mental models are " subjective functional models for technical, physical and social processes and complex conditions (eg syllogistic conclusions) ." Since we know the serial entities of the world, so in small individual steps and this succession, the perceived details have to be assembled by the brain only to wholes. The resulting mental models have a reduced complexity compared to the reality, which the constituents of the world for the working memory - are applicable - with its very limited capacity. The complexity reduction can be done, according to Philip Johnson -Laird and Dedre Gentner, in three ways:

In adaptive creatures a part of the perceptions in the memory remains - at least the "important", serving survival. With sufficient intelligence to recognize patterns in these experiences and, from these, rules are derived. Arise as mental representations of the individual relevant sections of the world over time.

The perception varies by the individual contents of memory, moods and thought processes of the perceiver, which are used to construct the mental model - the result is that each creature has its own perception. These models are required to provide information that should be re-recorded, even being able to just put it into a context and thus can understand and evaluate. With the addition of information and impressions then the possibilities for representation of reality in a mental model for future perceptions are constantly expanded, so it enters a learning effect.

It is not only the components of the mental model for each person differently, but their weighting. While some people tend to think pictorially, others orient themselves more to other sensory impressions and experiences, such as pain or happiness.

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