Mental Models and Creative Problem-Solving: The Relationship of Objective and Subjective Model Attributes

Leader cognition in vision formation: Simplicity and negativity

“…Thus one would expect that leader vision formation, and leader performance, would improve when the mental model the leader is working with is simple as opposed to complex at least when both types of mental models accurately describe the phenomenon at hand. Some support for this argument has been provided in a study by Mumford et al (2012b). In this study, participants were asked to formulate solutions to managerial problems arising in the marketing and educational domains.…”

“…The first email presented a simple or complex mental model for understanding school performance. These mental models were both plausible, valid, models identified in earlier studies of mental models and problem-solving performance (Mumford et al, 2012b). The second email presented key concepts involved in the development of educational programs stressing cooperative learning where the number of concepts involved in cooperative learning was manipulated by presenting more or fewer concepts relevant to cooperative learning techniques (Scott et al, 2005).…”

“…First, the more and less complex mental models presented were based on prior research by Mumford et al (2012b), Barrett et al (2013), and Robledo et al (2012) concerning the influence of mental models on performance in solving educational problems. To ensure the realism of these models, the variables and linkages were devised by consulting the education literature of school effectiveness (Macbeath & Mortimore, 2001;Patchen, 2004;Stockard & Mayberry, 1992), with the eight of the sixteen more essential variables being retained in the simple model.…”

Effectiveness of Mental Model-Based Training for Complex System Operators: A Quasi-Experimental Study

“…Whereas empirical research has confirmed that MM of higher quality generally contributes to better job performance [3,4], an emerging body of research has examined the antecedents of MM quality, most of which investigates the impacts of individual characteristics including working experience [5], competence [6] and contextual factors, such as acute stress [7]. However, little attention has been paid to understand how to enhance MM quality through interventions.…”

A Comparison of Marine Pilots' Planning and Manoeuvring Skills: Uncovering Mental Models to Assess Shiphandling and Explore Expertise

“…Mental models can be seen as knowledge structures which are formed of stored long term static information (Johnson-Laird, 1983) that can be exploited to explain, interact and direct problem solving (AlDiban and Ifenthaler, 2011). When complex, novel, high risk problems are presented, people rely on mental models as a guide (Mumford et al, 2012) or as a map (Fiol and Huff, 1992). Evaluating how well mental representations are able to forecast future outcomes implies evaluating the prediction validity of the proposed methodology.…”