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A mental model is an explanation of someone's thought process about how something works in the real world. It is a representation of the surrounding world, the relationships between its various parts and a person's intuitive perception about his or her own acts and their consequences. Mental models can help shape behaviour and set an approach to solving problems (akin to a personal algorithm) and doing tasks. A mental model is a kind of internal symbol or representation of external reality, hypothesized to play a major role in cognition, reasoning and decision-making. Kenneth Craik suggested in 1943 that the mind constructs "small-scale models" of reality that it uses to anticipate events. Jay Wright Forrester defined general mental models as: The image of the world around us, which we carry in our head, is just a model. Nobody in his head imagines all the world, government or country. He has only selected concepts, and relationships between them, and uses those to represent the real system. In psychology, the term ''mental models'' is sometimes used to refer to mental representations or mental simulation generally. At other times it is used to refer to mental models and reasoning and to the mental model theory of reasoning developed by Philip Johnson-Laird and Ruth M.J. Byrne. ==History== The term ''mental model'' is believed to have originated with Kenneth Craik in his 1943 book ''The Nature of Explanation''. Georges-Henri Luquet in ''Le dessin enfantin'' (Children's drawings), published in 1927 by Alcan, Paris, argued that children construct internal models, a view that influenced, among others, child psychologist Jean Piaget. Philip Johnson-Laird published ''Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference and Consciousness'' in 1983. In the same year, Dedre Gentner and Albert Stevens edited a collection of chapters in a book also titled ''Mental Models''.〔("Mental models" ), report at www.lauradove.info.〕 The first line of their book explains the idea further: "One function of this chapter is to belabor the obvious; people's views of the world, of themselves, of their own capabilities, and of the tasks that they are asked to perform, or topics they are asked to learn, depend heavily on the conceptualizations that they bring to the task." (see the book: ''Mental Models''). Since then, there has been much discussion and use of the idea in human-computer interaction and usability by researchers including Donald Norman and Steve Krug (in his book ''Don't Make Me Think''). Walter Kintsch and Teun A. van Dijk, using the term ''situation model'' (in their book ''Strategies of Discourse Comprehension'', 1983), showed the relevance of mental models for the production and comprehension of discourse. ==Mental models and reasoning== One view of human reasoning is that it depends on mental models. In this view, mental models can be constructed from perception, imagination, or the comprehension of discourse (Johnson-Laird, 1983). Such mental models are akin to architects' models or to physicists' diagrams in that their structure is analogous to the structure of the situation that they represent, unlike, say, the structure of logical forms used in formal rule theories of reasoning. In this respect, they are a little like pictures in the picture theory of language described by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1922. Philip Johnson-Laird and Ruth M.J. Byrne developed a theory of mental models which makes the assumption that reasoning depends, not on logical form, but on mental models (Johnson-Laird and Byrne, 1991). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「mental model」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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