Mental models

…people form, maintain and change the mental models that shape perception. The call covers agency, interoception and emotion regulation, identity and self-narrative, and meaning or belonging. Projects should test mechanisms rather than only symptom relief. Up to USD 900,000 supports three years, including no more than 15% overhead. Submit an anonymised letter of intent by 5 October 2026 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. Full proposals in February 2027 require invitation.

…This talk uses Craik's account of mental models—supporting alternatives, prediction and transfer—to frame empirical tests. Spatial reasoning in language models and motion forecasting in visual models illustrate ways to probe those abilities, along with the limits of inferring world models from systems trained on human-produced representations.

…of utterances in four complementary mental models for discourse that interact with each other: the surface text, the text base, the situation model, and the context model. When people encounter metaphors in these utterances, they need to incorporate them into each of these mental representations for the discourse. Since influential metaphor theories define metaphor as a form of (figurative) analogy, involving cross-domain mapping of a smaller or great