in the future, competitive advantages will be given to organisations that can extract valuable information from massive data and make better decisions. in most cases, this data comes from multiple sources. therefore, the challenge is to aggregate them into a common framework in order to make them meaningful and useful.this paper will first review the most important multi-criteria decision analy...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to investigate the inductive and deductive reasoning abilities of people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Following previous research, it was predicted that people with OCD would show different abilities on inductive reasoning tasks but similar abilities to controls on deductive reasoning tasks. DESIGN A two-group comparison was used with both gro...

Article history: Received 7 January 2011 Received in revised form 12 May 2011 Accepted 17 May 2011 Available online xxxx The existence of general-purpose cognitive mechanisms related to intelligence, which appear to facilitate all forms of problem solving, conflicts with the strong modularity view of the mind espoused by some evolutionary psychologists. The current study assessed the contributi...

Atocha Aliseda’s Abductive Reasoning (2006) gives a structural characterization of the “forward” explanatory reasoning from a theory to observational data. This paper asks whether there are any interesting structural rules for the “backward” abductive reasoning from observations to explanatory theories. Ignoring statistical cases, a partial explication of abduction is converse deductive explana...

We present an exploratory study in deductive reasoning based on the experimental elicitation of external representations of the premises as a tool to investigate how individuals build models of the premises and how they use them in reasoning. The goal of our research is not to check whether external, explicit models are useful as an heuristic support in deductive tasks, but to devise a methodol...

When modelling realistic systems, physical constraints on the resources available are often required. For example, we might say that at most N processes can access a particular resource at any moment, exactly M participants are needed for an agreement, or an agent can be in exactly one mode at any moment. Such situations are concisely modelled where literals are constrained such that at most N ...

We report research investigating the role of mental models in deduction. The first study deals with conjunctive inferences (from one conjunction and two conditional premises) and disjunctive inferences (from one disjunction and the same two conditionals). The second study examines reasoning from multiple conditionals such as: If e then b; If a then b; If b then c; What follows between a and c? ...