A Brief Introduction Into Activation-Based Conditional Inference

Activation-based conditional inference integrates several aspects of human reasoning into formal conditional reasoning, such as focusing, forgetting, and remembering, by combining conditional reasoning and the cognitive architecture ACT-R. The idea is to select a reasonable subset of a conditional belief base before drawing inferences. The selection is based on an activation function which assigns to the conditionals in the belief base a degree of activation based on the conditional’s relevance for the current query and its usage history.