In this article jargon filled article, Brewer clarifies the similarities and differences between different types of mental models that have been developed to understand how humans represent complex ideas. This confusion is preventing related research efforts from coming up with a cohesive, shared understanding of how humans represent complex ideas. In other words, the jargon has gotten the better of the researchers in this field.
Schemas are precompiled, unconcious, generic knowledge structures.
I think of this as a well of unconcious, unapplied knowledge that I am intimately familiar with and that I can easily draw from when required. I create new mental structure. This new structure is refered to as an instantiated schema. A subset of these episodic models are causal episodic models. We create causal episodic models to represent physical systems, including people and objects.