Readers of stories construct mental models of the situation and characters described. They infer causal connections relating characters' actions to their goals. They also focus attention on characters' movements, thereby activating nearby parts of the mental model. This activation is revealed in readers' faster answering of questions about such parts, with less facilitation the greater their di...

Mode confusions are a type of “automation surprise”—circumstances where an automated system behaves differently than its operator expects. It is generally accepted that operators develop “mental models” for the behavior of automated systems and use these to guide their interaction with the systems concerned, so that an automation surprise results when the actual system behavior diverges from it...

In this chapter I discuss and draw conclusions on mental models of leaders in the South African quantum organisation. The conceptual framework describes the dynamic change leaders undergo in their mental models. The purpose of this chapter is twofold: first, to discuss the findings and secondly, to demonstrate rigorous practice by showing the important relationship between the central research ...

This study investigated the claim (e.g., Vosniadou & Brewer's, 1992) that children have naive "mental models" of the earth and believe, for example, that the earth is flat or hollow. It tested the proposal that children appear to have these misconceptions because they find the researchers' tasks and questions to be confusing and ambiguous. Participants were 6- and 7-year-olds (N=127) who were g...

We propose the Attachment Security Enhancement Model (ASEM) to suggest how romantic relationships can promote chronic attachment security. One part of the ASEM examines partner responses that protect relationships from the erosive effects of immediate insecurity, but such responses may not necessarily address underlying insecurities in a person's mental models. Therefore, a second part of the A...

Currently one of the most divisive issues in some Christian communities centers on women’s ordination. This study critically analyzes a religious discourse which defends and justifies the Southern Baptist Convention’s opposition to women’s ordination by using a sociocognitive approach as an underlying theoretical framework. The analysis aims to illustrate how a religious text both assumes and t...

Up until now there has been no agreement on what a mental model of a physical system is and how to infer the mental model a person has. This paper describes research aimed at solving these problems by proposing that a Mental Model is a dynamic representation created in WM by combining information stored in LTM (the Conceptual Model of the system) and characteristics extracted from the environme...

According to constructivism, learning takes place by constructing cognitive structures. An experiment was carried out to uncover the mental models of experienced, but not professional, users of a word processor. The study shows that the mental models are superficial, and that bricolage (trial-and-error) is extensively used even though it is not viable for solving nontrivial problems. The conclu...

The size of personal photo-collections has been increasing exponentially due to recent technological advances in camera industry. The current photo-browsers act more as passive querying interfaces where the users can search for their photos and view them. This model relying on human memory to view photos does not work well in the case of large photocollections and many photos, in-turn significa...