Related: Fake explanation, Guessing the teachers password, Understanding your understanding, many more
The mental model concept gets used so frequently and seems so intuitively obvious that I debated whether to bother writing this. But beyond the basic value that comes from unpacking our intuitions, it turns out that the concept allows a pretty impressive integration and streamlining of a wide range of mental phenomena.
It's much harder to extend the map metaphor to something that actually resembles human thought.
A map is necessarily a certain sort of model, but not all models can easily be represented as maps.