text: A mental model is an internal representation of external reality: that is, a way of representing reality within one's mind. Such models are hypothesized to play a major role in cognition, reasoning and decision-making. The term for this concept was coined in 1943 by Kenneth Craik, who suggested that the mind constructs "small-scale models" of reality that it uses to anticipate events. Mental models can help shape behaviour, including approaches to solving problems and performing tasks.
  In psychology, the term mental models is sometimes used to refer to mental representations or mental simulation generally. The concepts of schema and conceptual models are cognitively adjacent. Elsewhere, it is used to refer to the "mental model" theory of reasoning developed by Philip Johnson-Laird and Ruth M. J. Byrne.