A Formal Empirical Analysis Method for Human Reasoning and Interpretation

The study of human reasoning often concentrates on reasoning from an already assumed interpretation of the world, thereby neglecting reasoning towards an interpretation. In recent literature within Cognitive Science, means taken from the area of nonmonotonic logic are proposed to analyze the latter aspect of human reasoning. In this paper this claim is further worked out and tested against empirical material of human reasoning during critical situations (incident management). Empirical and simulated reasoning traces have been analyzed by comparing them and by automatically checking properties on them. 1