A Software to Capture Mental Models

Abstract

Research shows that people construct mental models of concepts, situations and things, thus the theory of mental models is a well-established phenomenon in science. While people are given a particular task, they also construct a mental model to solve that task, for instance; a task to draw spatial objects e.g. two polygons intersecting each other in a two-dimensional environment. Yet, there are merely fewer studies that point at a scientific software that helps to capture preferred and alternative mental models of people during tasks of drawing spatial objects. The major contribution of this work is foundation of an experimental environment as a software application that can recognise mental models of people during drawing spatial objects based on the spatial relations of the drawn objects. The software serves as an experimental environment to find out the preferred mental models based on spatial relations amongst drawn objects i.e. the preferred way of performing tasks to draw spatial objects. Regional Connectivity Calculus is used as an underlying spatial scheme to extract preferred mental models of people who draw drawings using the software. The time to perform each task, including the time to draw and the time to think to understand the drawing tasks is also determined by the software.