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 took it to be more specific. A reference to the way humans actually build and internally represent the abstractions that they use as a map.
I don't think I'm really clear on what sort of map would not constitute a mental model.