F1UPCHURCH@SEMASSU.BITNET (11/10/88)
I would suggest starting with the Gentner and Stevens book Mental Models (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publisher). The Chapter by Gentner and Gentner "Flowing Waters or Teeming Crowds: Mental Models of Electricity" sounds close to the description given. J. M. Carroll has several papers on metaphors and cognitive representations (Int. J. of Man-Machine Studies and IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics) but these date back to 1982 and 1985. The ACM SIGCHI proceedings usually have articles related to metaphors and analogies in learning to use software systems. Richard Upchurch F1UPCHURCH@SEMASSU.BITNET