Model appreciation problems are not just limited to electronic structure.
This figure shows a tube model and a space-filling model of axial methylcyclohexane. I tell my students that this molecule is destabilized by steric interactions between the methyl group and the two axial hydrogens, and I think I "see" these interactions when I look at these models. My students do not much evidence of steric interactions, however, because they think of steric interactions as resulting from collisions between different atoms.
These models, in fact, do not show any significant collisions between nonbonded atoms (the methyl's hydrogens just touch the axial hydrogens, but this kind of weak collision might actually be attractive). What the models do show is that several bond angles and dihedral angles are distorted from typical "ideal" values in order to minimize steric interactions, and these distortions are responsible for the increased energy of this conformer.