It is increasingly being recognized that understanding expert knowledge structures associated with critical decision processes may facilitate Naval personnel performance. Toward this end, system developers and training researchers attempt to identify critical components of expert operator assessment and knowledge. Differing domains of practice rely to varying degrees on perceptual and conceptua...

People are remarkably good at using their common sense to predict and explain behavior. Qualitative modeling has provided formalisms that seem to capture many important aspects of human mental models, but standard qualitative simulation algorithms have properties that make them implausible candidates for modeling the flexibility, robustness, and speed of human reasoning. This paper describes wo...

Deontic assertions concern what one ought to do, may do, and ought not to do. This paper proposes a theory of their meanings and of how these meanings are represented in mental models. The meanings of deontic assertions refer to sets of permissible and impermissible states. An experiment corroborated the ability of individuals to list these states. The most salient were those corresponding to t...

As scientists who are interested in studying people's mental models, we must develop appropriate experimental methods and discard our hopes of finding neat, elegant mental models, but instead learn to understand the messy, sloppy, incomplete, and indistinct structures that people actually have. A complex dynamic system can be thought of as a collection of interrelated variables whose structure ...

In this paper, we introduce a model for developing training systems for object-oriented analysis and design, which we believe addresses the shortcomings of traditional design methods for interactive systems, when applied to this class of problem. Our chief premise is that the identification of the cognitive processes that precipitate the success or failure of an object-oriented analysis and des...

The theory of probabilistic mental models (PMM; G. Gigerenzer, U. Hoffrage, & H. Kleinbölting, 1991) has had a major influence on the field of judgment and decision making, with the most recent important modifications to PMM theory being the identification of several fast and frugal heuristics (G. Gigerenzer & D. G. Goldstein, 1996). These heuristics were purported to provide psychologically pl...

This research examines the dynamics of consensus building in intracultural and intercultural negotiations achieved through the convergence of mental models between negotiators. Working from a dynamic constructivist view, according to which the effects of culture are socially and contextually contingent, we theorize and show in two studies of U.S. and Chinese negotiators that while consensus mig...

In recent years a number of empirical results indicate that humans tend to use mental models during the reasoning process. This theory claims that humans represent and reason about spatial information by constructing, inspecting, and generating alternative models to check for a putative conclusion. New results about preferred models and local transformations made it necessary to refine the clas...

The perspective of modelling agents rather than using them for a specificed purpose entails a difference in approach. In particular an emphasis on veracity as opposed to efficiency. An approach using evolving populations of mental models is described that goes some way to meet these concerns. It is then argued that social intelligence is not merely intelligence plus interaction but should allow...

People reject ‘paradoxical’ inferences, such as: Luisa didn’t play music; therefore, if Luisa played soccer, then she didn’t play music. For some theorists, they are invalid for everyday conditionals, but valid in logic. The theory of mental models implies that they are valid, but unacceptable because the conclusion refers to a possibility inconsistent with the premise. Hence, individuals shoul...