[farnsworth]

You could say that humans understand the world by building a "model" of it in our minds. When we are trying to decide how to act, we can simulate a situation by running it through the model. For example, you might have a model of your boss that helps you predict how they will react if you give them bad news. And you might have a mental model of your country that you can use to predict what will happen if it goes to war or goes broke. Every time you learn something, you can use it to adjust your mental model. It's like a simulation of the world inside your mind. Pretty cool, actually.

People can end up with very different mental models of the same objects because they trained them with different data (ie, had different experiences growing up) or because other mental models impacted the interpretation of the data, and the development of those different mental models.