How people construct mental models 论文

摘要

Analogies are powerful ways to understand how things work in a new domain. We think this is because analogies enable people to construct a structure–mapping that carries across the way the components in a system interact. This allows people to create new mental models that they can then run to generate predictions about what should happen in various situations in the real world. This paper shows how analogies can be used to construct models of evaporation and how two subjects used such models to reason about evaporation.