The theory of mental models accounts for the meanings of causal relations in daily life. They refer to seven temporallyordered deterministic relations between possibilities, which include causes, prevents, and enables. Various factors— forces, mechanisms, interventions— can enter into the interpretation of causal assertions, but they are not part of their core meanings. Mental models represent ...

The process of learning is not always as simple as mapping inputs to the best outputs. Often internal state is needed to distinguish between observably identical states of the world. Genetic programming has concentrated on solving problems in the functional/reactive arena, in part because of the absence of a natural way to incorporate memory into the paradigm. This paper presents a simple addit...

Agents must form and update mental models about each other in a wide range of domains: team coordination, plan recognition, social simulation, user modeling, games of incomplete information, etc. Existing research typically treats the problem of forming beliefs about other agents as an isolated subproblem, where the modeling agent starts from an initial set of possible models for another agent ...

This paper reviews a class of cognitive representations collectively known as mental models. These representations purport to integrate certain aspects of propositional and imagistic theories of knowledge representation while enabling more detailed theories of human cognitive behavior. This paper explores the nature of mental models by considering basic philosophical issues including ontology a...

When we think, we generally use concepts that we have not invented ourselves but that reflect the shared understandings of our community. We tend not to question views when they reflect an outlook on the world that is shared by everyone around us. An important example for development pertains to how people view the need to provide cognitive stimulation to children. In many societies, parents ta...

configural description or a mixture of the two, and rarely any other kind. These questions are not just an issue of academic interest. We have all often had frustrating experience trying to understand verbal directions a b u t how to get somewhere or trying to grasp the layout of an area by means of a map. Virtual reality is currently being proposed as having great potential for training people...

There are many simple, everyday tasks, such as following road directions, using instructions to assemble a bicycle, reading a novel, or helping to solve your child’s geometry homework, that seem to entail constructing a spatial mental model from a description. In order to comprehend Go straight till the jrs t light, then turn left, go down about three blocks to Oak, and make a right, it is usef...

Scerri and Erduran (2002) recently resurrected the question: How is knowledge developed and justified in chemistry? Scerri (2003) denies a role for constructivism in chemical education even though chemistry courses use humanly constructed models to represent sub-microscopic particles. The unobservable nature of most chemistry means that humanly constructed mental imagery is an essential element...

This survey investigates the relationship between exposure to television portrayals of Latinos and real world perceptions of Latinos in the U.S. To aid in this assessment, contributions from the research on mental models were incorporated into a cultivation framework. From this mental models-based cultivation perspective, it was expected that amount of television exposure and existing cognition...