Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The problem of access to prior cases in memory is a central Issue in the case-based reasoning Previous work on thematic knowledge structures has shown that using a complete exemplar of a thematic pattern allows access to the structure and related cases in memory. However, the knowledge and expectations provided by such structures can aid in planning and problem-solving. Therefore, to be most useful, the Information should become available before the Input pattern Is complete. Retrieval must therefore be possible based on only a subset of the features present In the full thematic pattern. This study investigated whether a pattern that contains elements predicting an outcome, but not the outcome itself, would result In access comparable to that found when a full pattern is used. The results showed that subjects were less successful accessing the thematic structure using partial patterns than they were when using full patterns. However, remindings based on partial patterns occurred more often than would be expected by chance. W e conclude that partial patterns contain some predictive features that can allow access to a thematic knowledge structure before the pattern Is complete.