Word.ws English Dictionary

mental model

mental model noun: someone's understanding of how a system works.

Noun

mental model (plural mental models)

  1. Someone's understanding of how a system works.
    • My mental model, however, extends over multiple time periods. In time period one, you import a large number of guest workers who impose adjustment costs on their neighbors, including other immigrants with whom they compete for resources.2007 December 31, Megan McArdle, “Mental models of immigration”, in The Atlantic
    • […] who argue that we still have biologically fixed Stone Age minds constituted by mental models evolved to solve problems of Pleistocene environments, principally those of the African savanna of three million years ago.2008 January 24, Steven Mithen, “When We Were Nicer”, in London Review of Books, volume 30, number 02, →ISSN

Forms of mental model

pluralmental models

Origin of mental model

Introduced by Scottish philosopher Kenneth Craik in The Nature of Explanation (1943).

Questions about mental model

What does mental model mean?
Mental model means someone's understanding of how a system works.
What part of speech is mental model?
Mental model is a noun.
What is the plural of mental model?
The plural of mental model is mental models.

Words near mental model in the dictionary

  1. mental masturbation
  2. mental math
  3. mental mediumship
  4. mental midget
  5. mental midgets
  6. mental model
  7. mental models
  8. mental nerve
  9. mental nerves
  10. mental patient
  11. mental patients

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: mental model (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “mental model.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mental_model. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.