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.
I don't think I'm really clear on what sort of map would not constitute a mental model.
Say... one represented as a lookup table the size of Jupiter, for example. We don't think like that.