Empirical cognitive studies about formal argumentation

The evaluation of the adequacy of approaches to formal argumentation is often done through instantiations with other established formalisms, such as logic programming or non-monotonic logic. Furthermore, new developments are frequently motivated with examples of use cases that call for the additional features. While such evaluation approaches might be useful and technically sound, they often fail to show to what degree and under what circumstances they reflect human reasoning. In order to address this challenge, in recent years multiple empirical cognitive studies have been conducted to test the relationship between human behaviour and the formal models of abstract and structured argumentation. In this chapter we describe, compare and discuss these studies, taking into account their different methodological approaches. Furthermore we discuss their relevance and potential benefits for formal argumentation, and we review various open questions that are left for future research in this area