ABSTRACT
In the past, many research projects have aimed at a better understanding of how one learns a language, a set of procedures, a large corpus of facts, nonsense syllables, etc. In this chapter, we focus on a new domain—one that shares very few properties with any of the previous. The domain is that of mechanistic devices, including physical machines, electronic and hydraulic systems, and even hybrids such as electro-mechanical systems. Our top-level goals are: (1) to investigate what it means for a person to understand a complex system, in particular, the mental models that experts form of how a system functions given the system's constituents and their interconnections; and (2) to discover principles that orient the acquisition of the capability to construct these models.
