Transformational change forces institutions to adopt new conceptual frameworks, beliefs and meanings. This study investigates the strategies used to bring about institutional change that likely leads to new organizational sense-making. Through a qualitative investigation at six US colleges and universities, it identified key strategies that led to the adoption of new mental models, including on...

This paper calls for a change in our theoretical perspectives on the nature of understanding as ideas embedded in the mind-as-container metaphor. In particular, it is suggested that we should adopt Bereiter’s [1] postulation that understanding is best understood as resulting from the ways an individual may be positioned relative to the knowledge object. As such, it is proposed that understandin...

Research on people's confidence in their general knowledge has to date produced two fairly stable effects, many inconsistent results, and no comprehensive theory. We propose such a comprehensive framework, the theory of probabilistic mental models (PMM theory). The theory (a) explains both the overconfidence effect (mean confidence is higher than percentage of answers correct) and the hard-easy...

This article presents a theory of how individuals detect whether descriptions of an entity are consistent or inconsistent. The theory postulates that individuals try to construct a mental model of the entity in which all the propositions are true. If they succeed, they infer that the description is consistent; otherwise, they infer that it is inconsistent. We report three experiments that corro...

This review addresses the long-standing puzzle of how logic and probability fit together in human reasoning. Many cognitive scientists argue that conventional logic cannot underlie deductions, because it never requires valid conclusions to be withdrawn - not even if they are false; it treats conditional assertions implausibly; and it yields many vapid, although valid, conclusions. A new paradig...

Using a fan effect paradigm, three experiments tested whether younger and older adults differ in the retrieval of integrated and nonintegrated facts, where integration refers to the development of a mental model. Earlier work by G. A. Radvansky and R. T. Zacks ( 1991 ) had found that as long as facts can be integrated into a single mental model, young adults show no increase in retrieval time o...

Boolean relations, such as and, or, and not, are a fundamental way to create new concepts out of old. Classic psychological studies showed that such concepts differed in how difficult they were to learn, but did not explain the source of these differences. Recent theories have reinvigorated the field with explanations ranging from the complexity of minimal descriptions of a concept to the relat...

To detail the structure and format of memory for texts, researchers have examined whether readers monitor separate text dimensions for space, time, and characters. The authors proposed that the interactivity between these individual dimensions may be as critical to the construction of complex mental models as the discrete dimensions themselves. In the present experiments, participants read stor...

Team working is the basic way of working in the control rooms of hazardous technologies and therefore its quality is a safety-relevant issue. In addition to the technological competence it is also crucial for the crews to have the necessary communicational skills. During simulator training these skills can only be improved if the simulator use is embedded in an appropriate setting. To support t...

This study examined the relationship between the similarity and accuracy of team mental models and compared the extent to which each predicted team performance. The relationship between team ability composition and team mental models was also investigated. Eighty-three dyadic teams worked on a complex skill task in a 2-week training protocol. Results indicated that although similarity and accur...