When we practice, we say that we do it to learn things. But since the target of practice is procedural performance rather than conceptual knowledge, we need to be very clear about what it is that we are trying to develop.
Any performance consists of three components or inputs. They all play a different role, require different schemas and different practice. Yet, they feed into each other. Each of the components can be thought of independently but usually they are very interconnected. Different disciplines and tasks with them differ in how prominent these components are within them.
The three components are:
Mental map is what allows you to orient yourself in the situation you are facing. It is your primary sense-making instrument - it governs what you focus on, what you ignore and how you solve problems or react to new situations. Sometimes they are referred to as mental model.
The mental map or model are not the same as concepts about what you are facing. They are entirely pragmatic to help you achieve what you want. Just like any maps, they are not the territory. They can be extremely simplified or even slightly wrong but they are still useful.
For example, the mental map of a situation of you reading in a room with an open window and hearing a noise outside. Your mental map tells you that the hole in the wall is letting more sound in, so you stand up and close the window.
Another example is that you come to a device with a display or with a chord leading to an electrical outlet. Your mental map tells you that such devices have ways of being turned on, so you will look for a switch.
Mental maps also help you solve problems. The mental map you have of books is that they have sequential pages and text that ends on one continues on another. When the text going from one page to next stops making sense, you will check the page number to see if somebody tore out a page.
When you are writing and you cannot think of the next word, your mental map will send you to the thesaurus and will tell you roughly where to look.
To develop mental maps, you have to combine conceptual and procedural learning. Mental maps are not ideas or definitions. They are models of the problems you are trying to solve or the task you are trying to accomplish.
Simply having a map to guide you is not enough, if you cannot recognise waypoints or that you have achieved your destination. That’s why you also need an eye that can perceive what your map is orienting you towards.
Your eye can recognise multiple features of a device your map tells you can be turned on as a button.