Introspection tells me that when I try to understand a concept I often have parasitic images that come along that need to be recognised and that can make it more or less easy to understand the concept. In any case they can get in the way, but images can also help.
Let me give an example: the mathematical notion of function is often explained as a set of ordered couples.
If you are told this then you might begin visualising backets and commas that live in some kind of space, and this is somewhat unfortunate. Someone else might imagine a mathematical function as a kind of little engine that takes inputs and produces outputs with a little bit of noise like all engines do. Both views are somewhat incompatible superficially. I do recall a logician called Borthwick who told me back in 1978 that he could never imagine a function as being a set of ordered couples.
One of the problems with the notion of sets is that it's relatively easy to picture a finite set, but hugely difficult to imagine giant sets (infinite or not). These unwanted pictures can lead us down the wrong road and sometimes we arent fully aware of the influence they have on us.
I suspect that this unwanted interference occurs more when you are beginning on a field.
I'm not sure the term epi-understanding is the best I could do with, so please suggest something else.
A related and similar term seems to be "connotation".
