text: Since then, there has been much discussion and use of the idea in human-computer interaction and usability by researchers including Donald Norman and Steve Krug (in his book Don't Make Me Think). Walter Kintsch and Teun A. van Dijk, using the term situation model (in their book Strategies of Discourse Comprehension, 1983), showed the relevance of mental models for the production and comprehension of discourse.
  Charlie Munger popularized the use of multi-disciplinary mental models for making business and investment decisions.
  Mental models and reasoning
  One view of human reasoning is that it depends on mental models. In this view, mental models can be constructed from perception, imagination, or the comprehension of discourse (Johnson-Laird, 1983). Such mental models are similar to architects' models or to physicists' diagrams in that their structure is analogous to the structure of the situation that they represent, unlike, say, the structure of logical forms used in formal rule theories of reasoning. In this respect, they are a little like pictures in the picture theory of language described by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1922. Philip Johnson-Laird and Ruth M.J. Byrne developed their mental model theory of reasoning which makes the assumption that reasoning depends, not on logical form, but on mental models (Johnson-Laird and Byrne, 1991).