Differential Roles for Visuospatial and Verbal Working Memory in the Construction of Mental Models of Physical Systems

People use Mental Models while interacting with physical systems. Designers have been using knowledge elicitation techniques to infer user's mental model in order to design interfaces compatible with it. However, to use those techniques correctly we need to define a model that shows how Mental Models are constructed and simulated during the execution of the elicitation task. Caas and Antol (1998) proposed that a Mental Model is a dynamic representation created in Working Memory (WM) by combining information stored in Long Term Memory (the user's Conceptual Model of the system) and characteristics extracted from the environment. This paper describes an experiment that analyses the role of the WM components in the construction of Mental Models. It is concluded that both structure and function information of Mental Models is processed at the visuospatial component of WM. In addition, data supports the idea that function information is also processed at the verbal component of WM. Finally, some theoretical and practical implications for research on Mental Models and the use of knowledge elicitation techniques are discussed