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How Brains Make Mental Models Paul Thagard Abstract. Many psychologists, philosophers, and computer scientist have written about mental models, but have remained vague about the nature of such models. Do they consist of propositions, concepts, rules, images, or some other kind of mental representation? This paper will argue that a unified account can be achieved by understanding mental models as representations consisting of patterns of activation in populations of neurons. The fertility of this account will be illustrated by showing its applicability to causal reasoning and the generation of novel concepts in scientific discovery and technological innovation. I will also discuss the implications of this view of mental models for evaluating claims that cognition is embodied. 1 Introduction Mental models are psychological representations that have the same rela- tional structure as what they represent. They have been invoked to explain many important aspects of human reasoning, including deduction, induction, problem solving, language understanding, and human-machine interaction. But the nature of mental models and the processes that operate on them has not always been clear from the psychological discussions. The main aim of this paper is to provide a neural account of mental models by describing some of the brain mechanisms that produce them. The neural representations required to understand mental models are also valuable for providing new understanding of how minds perform abduction, a kind of inference that generates and/or evaluates explanatory hypotheses. Considering the neural mechanisms that support abductive in- ference makes it possible to address several aspects of abduction, some first Paul Thagard Department of Philosophy, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada e-mail: pthagard@uwaterloo.ca L. Magnani et al.