Adequacy in Mental Representation and Planning

It is completely useless for a human being seeking to decide on a course of action to look for a perfect match between the real world and his own representation of it indeed doing this would represents a disability. 

A number of schools which are geographically remote from each other (Norman in the United States, [27] Ochanine in Russia, [28] Piaget in France, [29]) had all emphasised very early on, in different words, the distortion inherent in mental models as compared with the real world, their simplicity and emphasis on pnrpose and all ultimately stressed the usefulness of those distortions in terms of success in action (and conununication). 

These simplifications and distortions of the real world are responses to the psychological impossibility, in terms of both intensity and quality, of perceiving, knowing, nnderstanding and doing everything (this idea is also at the centre of the work of Herbert Simon, who won the Nobel Prize in 1978 for his work on bounded rationality [30]). 

In addition, the mental model is not primarily intended to reflect something real, but its purpose is to predict what one is going to do and what will happen, and that function is essential. 

The representation of the world allows the operator to mentally transform the world, to be concerned about events and anticipate corrections (Piaget s concept of the pre-correction function, op cit.). This is shown by the fact that doctors, who are experts in standardisation, and expert pilots, spend more time avoiding problems in advance than managing real problems [31]. Those working in the areas of planning and problon-solving have regularly identified these properties of adaptation and correction by anticipation [32]. 

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