Mental Model (Wikipedia)
An encyclopedia article on the mental model concept: its 1943 coinage by Kenneth Craik, the two separate research tracks it split into in the 1980s (Johnson-Laird’s reasoning theory; Gentner and Stevens’s HCI/device-understanding branch), and its later use in usability research by Donald Norman and others. Wikipedia articles are continuously edited, so year above reflects the access date (2026-07-13), not a fixed publication year.
License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Key points
- Kenneth Craik coined “mental model” in his 1943 book The Nature of Explanation, proposing that the mind builds “small-scale models” of reality to anticipate events rather than reasoning about the world directly each time.
- Philip Johnson-Laird’s 1983 book Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness developed a mental-model theory of reasoning, later extended with Ruth M.J. Byrne — the claim that reasoning depends on constructing and checking models of a situation, not on applying formal logical rules. This remains an active scientific debate against rival formal-rule, domain-specific-rule, and probabilistic accounts of reasoning.
- In the same year, Dedre Gentner and Albert Stevens edited a separate essay collection also titled Mental Models, opening with the observation that people’s understanding of the world, their own capabilities, and the tasks they’re asked to perform all depend on the conceptualizations they bring to a task.
- The Gentner/Stevens branch fed directly into human-computer interaction and usability research, cited by name as taken up by Donald Norman and Steve Krug (Don’t Make Me Think).
- Related, cognitively adjacent terms noted by the article: schema (psychology), conceptual models, and — in discourse-comprehension research by Walter Kintsch and Teun A. van Dijk — situation models.
- The article’s own reasoning-theory detail (axioms of iconicity, the “principle of truth,” counterexample-based validity checking) is aimed at cognitive-science debate about human reasoning generally, rather than at design application specifically.