Can mental models be considered harmful?

  • Authors:

  • Victor Kaptelinin

  • Affiliations:

  • Institute of General and Educational Psychology, Russia, CIS

  • Venue:
  • CHI '92 Posters and Short Talks of the 1992 SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 1992

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Abstract

This paper deals with mental models of interactive systems and their role in human - computer interaction. In the first section, mental models are differentiated from two other kinds of cognitive phenomena: production rules and "functional cognitive maps". Next, an experiment is described, in which an interactive system was presented to students with the help of a state transition diagram or a set of "production rules". The use of production rules was found to be an advantage in this experiment. The paper concludes with a discussion of mental models in the context of skill automatization and user interface transparency problems.