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What Is Mental Model And Explore It How Applied Hci ( Human Computer Interaction )

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Introduction

In this report, I am going to talk about what is mental model and explore it how applied in HCI (Human computer interaction). Ordering to provide more compelling evidence and data to analysis mental model, an experiment about personal mental model build will be developed. In the end, a conclusion about this report also will be present. Reference list and appendix for this report will be placed in the last part.

What is mental model

The concept of mental model was formulated by Carik in1943, mental model is used to represent internal representations of a system, includes hypothesis, explanation and impression that can influence people how to cognitive, explain, facing this world and take action [1].

As we know, mental …show more content…

Mental model is situated between the consciousness and behavior, and it is the highest symptom model [3]. Psychologist also regards mental model as the main way to understand human perception, cognition, decision and construct [1].
Although there’s a lot of different realization from different field experts, they still have a lot in common characteristic. Mental model can display that our cognition for external structure or knowledge structure. And mental model is combined by object and the relationship of the object, and it is also a kind of structure of vision [4]. Thus, it can help us to cognitive this world what we see. But it also has some limitation, mental model is depends on people’s personal experience, background, knowledge and other factors [5]. Such as someone think the Google search is useful, and they can have a simple mental model before they use because they often use it, but someone never use Google before, they would build a complex mental model to think about how to use Google before they use. As we can see, personal experience has affect on mental model very directly, but experience is unlimited, as same as knowledge and other factors, so the mental model has limitation because it would be changed by some uncertain factors.

Mental Model In HCI

After the theory of mental model is created, it has far-reaching influence on Human Ergonomics, also include software engineering, system develop, electronic

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