Mental Models (Gentner-Stevens book)

'Mental Models' is the title of a book published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., in 1983 ISBN 089859-242-9. It was edited by Dedre Gentner and Albert L. Stevens, both employees of Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc. at the time. It appeared at about the same time as a book by the same name by Philip Johnson-Laird. According to the acknowledgment of the book, it resulted from a workshop on mental models held at the University of San Diego in October of 1980, that was jointly sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and the Sloan Foundation.

Here is a listing of the chapters along with a brief descriptions for some of them.

1. Some Observations on Mental Models - Donald A. Norman, UCSD Dr. Norman describes the properties of mental models - that they can be contradictory, incomplete, superstitious, erroneous, and unstable, varying in time. So the job of system designers is to help users form an accurate and useful mental model of a system. And the job of researchers is to set up experiments to learn to understand actual mental models, even though they may be messy and incomplete.

2. Phenomenology and the Evolution of Intuition - Andrea A. diSessa, MIT

3. Surrogates and Mappings: Two Kinds of Conceptual Models for Interactive Devices - Richard M. Young, Medical Research Council, Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge, England

4. Qualitative Reasoning About Space and Motion - Kenneth D. Forbus, MIT

5. The Role of Problem Representation in Physics - Jill H. Larkin, Carnegie Mellon University

6. Flowing Waters or Teeming Crowds:Mental Models of Electricity - Dedre Gentner, Bolt Beranek and Newman, and Donald R. Gentner, UCSD

7. Human Reasoning About a Simple Physical System - Michael D. Williams, Xerox PARC, James D. Homman, and Albert L. Stevens, Bolt Beranek and Newman

8. Assumptions and Ambiguities in Mechanistic Mental Models - Johan de Kleer and John Seely Brown, Xerox PARC

9. Understanding Micronesian Navigation - Edwin Hutchins, Navy Personnel Research and Development Center

10. Conceptual Entities - James G. Greeno, University of Pittsburgh

11. Using the Method of Fibres in Mecho to Calculate Radii of Gyration - Alan Bundy, University of Edinburgh

12. When Heat and Temperature Were One - Marianne Wiser ad Susan Carey, MIT

13. Naive Theories of Motion - Michael McCloskey, Johns Hopkins University

14. A Conceptual Model Discussed by Galileo and Used Intuitively by Physics Students - John Clement, University of Massachusetts