Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Diagnostic reasoning underlies many intelligent activities, including (but not limited to) situation assessment/ context recognition, natural language understanding, scene recognition, interpretation of scientific observations, and, of course, medical diagnosis and other forms of fault-finding. In this paper, we present a memory-directed, schema-based approach to diagnostic reasoning. Features of the problem are used to "evoke" one or more possible diagnoses, stored as schemas. Schemas contain information about their "manifestations" that be used to confirm or deny the diagnosis and, in some applications, information that can be used to take action based on the diagnosis. Potential advantages of the approach include cognitive plausibility, rule exception handling via (generalized) case-based reasoning, applicability to multiple domains, extensibility from experience, itnd a natural way to organize knowledge about what to do after a diagnosis is made.