Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Some basic characteristics of subjects' use of mental models of physical systems are discussed. Many representations for physical knowledge suggested so far, including qualitative-reasoning-based models, do not account for these experimental findings. This paper presents a connectionist architecture which suggests an explanation of these experimental results. Two simulation experiments are described which demonstrate how mental models of physical systems may evolve and why grounding symbols used by a mental model to a quantitative representation is necessary.