---
title: "An Analysis of Psychological Experiments on Non-Monotonic Reasoning"
authors:
  - "Edward Hoenkamp"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1987/22"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1987/0022.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Tenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1987
pages: "115-116"
track: "Cognitive Modeling"
keywords:
---

# An Analysis of Psychological Experiments on Non-Monotonic Reasoning

Edward Hoenkamp

*Proceedings of the Tenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 115-116.

## Abstract

Since hardly any of people's everyday decisions are made with certainty, it is often necessary to retract earlier conclusions on the basis of new input. This aspect of common-sense reasoning in humans is often cited as a raison d'etre for non-monotonic theories. Going beyond this intuitive notion, this paper is based on well-documented psychological experiments. In these experiments it turns out that inferences are often remarkably unresponsive to new input even if the original basis for the inferences is ·discredited. The focus in the present paper, therefore, is on modeling this pervasive, yet counter-intuitive retraction behavior.