Mental Models & Cognitive Representation

Primes about the internal representations that structure thought and action, spanning mental models, schemas, problem spaces, personas, and the metacognitive and emotional processes that build, blend, and share them.

10 primes in this family — primes that sit near one another in abstraction space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Agency — A system pursues representable goals through actions whose selection is sensitive to its beliefs about its situation, via a goal-representation, world-model, and action-selection coupling.
• Conceptual Blending — Combine ideas into new space.
• Constructivist Learning — Build knowledge from experience.
• Emotional Reasoning — Decisions shaped by emotion.
• Mental Model — Internal system representation.
• Metacognition — Awareness of thinking processes.
• Persona — A synthesized, named, concrete archetype that stands in for an unwieldy population during reasoning under uncertainty, trading coverage for cognitive traction.
• Problem Space — Range of possibilities.
• Schema — Structured knowledge framework.
• Shared Mental Model — A jointly maintained external artefact anchoring distributed reasoning.