Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper explores the uncertainty aspects of human abductive reasoning. Echo, a model of abduction based on the Theory of Explanatory Coherence (Thagard, 1992a), captures many aspects of human abductive reasoning, but fails to sufficiently manage the uncertainty in abduction. In particular, Echo does not handle belief acquisition and dynamic belief revision, two essential components of human abductive reasoning. We propose a modified Echo model (UEcho), in which we add a learning mechanism for belief acquisition and a dynamic processing mechanism for belief revision. To evaluate the model, we report an empirical study in which base rate learning serves as a testbed for belief acquisition and the order effect serves as a testbed for belief revision.