Mental models and cognitive change

Abstract

Abstract The theory of mental models owes its origins to Peirce's logic in the nineteenth century and to Craik's psychological research during the Second World War. This Special Issue marks the 30th anniversary of a book that tried to pull these and other strands together into a unified approach to comprehension and reasoning: Mental Models. The principal assumption of the theory is that individuals reason by trying to envisage the possibilities compatible with what they know or believe. The present paper reviews recent developments in the theory. It describes the issues that arise as a result of cognitive changes both in the short term and in the long term. And it introduces the set of papers in this Special Issue that explore such changes in mind. Keywords: Cognitive changeMental modelsReview Acknowledgments I am grateful to the editors, the authors, and my colleagues for their helpful criticisms, especially Sunny Khemlani and Max Lotstein who helped to carry out research for this article, which was funded by National Science Foundation Grant No. SES 0844851 to study deductive and probabilistic reasoning.