Chapter 21 Further Reading: Mental Models

Primary Sources

Chase, W. G., & Simon, H. A. — "Perception in Chess" (1973, Cognitive Psychology, 12(3), 394–427) The foundational paper on chunking in expert chess cognition. Chase and Simon demonstrated that expert chess memory is for patterns (chunks) rather than positions, and estimated grandmaster chunk libraries at approximately 50,000 positions. This is the cornerstone of the pattern-recognition account of expertise and directly informs everything in this chapter.

de Groot, A. D. — Thought and Choice in Chess (1965, English translation of 1946 Dutch original) The original research on chess master cognition that Chase and Simon built on. De Groot was the first to show the dramatic memory advantage of grandmasters over club players. The book is broader than just the memory experiments — it covers move selection and problem-solving processes, and is a masterwork of cognitive science from the pre-computational era.

Chi, M. T. H. — "Two Approaches to the Study of Expert's Characteristics" (1986, in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance) A clear overview of the research program on expert/novice knowledge differences, including the categorization research and self-explanation work that Chi's lab pioneered. A good entry point to Chi's corpus.

Schema Theory and Prior Knowledge

Bartlett, F. C. — Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (1932) The book that introduced the concept of schema to psychology — though Bartlett called them "schemata." His famous experiments on memory distortion (people recalled stories in ways that conformed to their cultural schemas) established that memory is constructive and schema-driven. Dense but historically essential.

Anderson, R. C., & Pearson, P. D. — "A Schema-Theoretic View of Basic Processes in Reading Comprehension" (1984, in Handbook of Reading Research) Shows how prior knowledge schemas affect reading comprehension directly — one of the clearest demonstrations of the knowledge effect in an educational context.

Recht, D. R., & Leslie, L. — "Effect of Prior Knowledge on Good and Poor Readers' Comprehension of Text" (1988, Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(1), 16–20) A striking experiment: good readers with low baseball knowledge performed worse on baseball text comprehension than poor readers with high baseball knowledge. Prior domain knowledge outweighed general reading skill. One of the clearest demonstrations of the knowledge effect in reading.

Worked Examples and Cognitive Load

Sweller, J. — "Cognitive Load During Problem Solving: Effects on Learning" (1988, Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257–285) The original cognitive load theory paper. Sweller demonstrates why worked examples benefit novices — they reduce the cognitive load of problem-solving, freeing capacity for learning. This paper is the theoretical foundation for the worked examples research program.

Kalyuga, S., Ayres, P., Chandler, P., & Sweller, J. — "The Expertise Reversal Effect" (2003, Educational Psychologist, 38(1), 23–31) The definitive paper on the expertise reversal effect — showing that instruction helpful for novices can impair learning in more advanced learners. Essential reading for understanding why one-size-fits-all instruction fails.

Self-Explanation

Chi, M. T. H., Bassok, M., Lewis, M. W., Reimann, P., & Glaser, R. — "Self-Explanations: How Students Study and Use Examples in Learning to Solve Problems" (1989, Cognitive Science, 13(2), 145–182) The foundational self-explanation paper. Chi and colleagues show that students who spontaneously self-explain while studying worked examples learn more than those who don't, and identify the types of self-explanation most associated with learning. Essential reading.

Chi, M. T. H. — "Self-Explaining Expository Texts: The Dual Processes of Generating Inferences and Repairing Mental Models" (2000, in Advances in Instructional Psychology, Vol. 5) Extends the self-explanation work to text comprehension. Shows that self-explanation promotes both inference generation (connecting new information to existing knowledge) and model repair (correcting inaccurate prior models). Illuminates why self-explanation produces qualitatively different understanding.

Accessible Reading

Johnson-Laird, P. N. — Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness (1983) The book that defined the "mental model" concept in cognitive science. Technical but foundational. Johnson-Laird argues that human reasoning is based on mental models rather than formal logic — we simulate scenarios to reason about them. The implications for learning are substantial.

Gentner, D., & Stevens, A. L. (Eds.) — Mental Models (1983) A collection of papers on mental models across many domains — physics, mathematics, language, programming. Shows how mental model research applies across very different fields. Some chapters are technical; many are accessible.