text: History The term mental model is believed to have originated with Kenneth Craik in his 1943 book The Nature of Explanation. Georges-Henri Luquet in Le dessin enfantin (Children's drawings), published in 1927 by Alcan, Paris, argued that children construct internal models, a view that influenced, among others, child psychologist Jean Piaget.
  Jay Wright Forrester defined general mental models thus:
  The image of the world around us, which we carry in our head, is just a model. Nobody in his head imagines all the world, government or country. He has only selected concepts, and relationships between them, and uses those to represent the real system (Forrester, 1971).
  Philip Johnson-Laird published Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference and Consciousness in 1983. In the same year, Dedre Gentner and Albert Stevens edited a collection of chapters in a book also titled Mental Models. The first line of their book explains the idea further: "One function of this chapter is to belabor the obvious; people's views of the world, of themselves, of their own capabilities, and of the tasks that they are asked to perform, or topics they are asked to learn, depend heavily on the conceptualizations that they bring to the task." (see the book: Mental Models).