This article presents a study of how humans perceive and judge the relevance of documents. Humans are adept at making reasonably robust and quick decisions about what information is relevant to them, despite the ever increasing complexity and volume of their surrounding information environment. The literature on document relevance has identified various dimensions of relevance (e.g., topicality...

Response time (RT) for identifying single letters is usually indifferent to disorientation, but in Experiment 1 RT increased with the angular deviation from that of the preceding letter (ADP). This occurs only when the same letter is repeated, which suggests a process of backward alignment. RT again increased with ADP when the same letter was repeated in the same format (normal or mirror-reflec...

Can covert sensorimotor simulation of stimulus-relevant actions influence affective judgments, even when there is no intention to act? Skilled and novice typists picked which of two letter dyads they preferred. In each pair, one dyad, if typed using standard typing methods, would involve the same fingers (e.g., FV); the other would be typed with different fingers (e.g., FJ). Thus, if typed, dya...

Though unifications of some of the numerous theories of default reasoning have been found, we add to doubts about the existence of universal theories by viewing default reasoning from the standpoint of decision theory as a case of rational self-government of inference. Default rules express not only methods for deriving new conclusions from old, but also preferences among sets of possible concl...

Our understanding of the human default mode network derives primarily from neuroimaging data but its electrophysiological correlates remain largely unexplored. To address this limitation, we recorded intracranially from the human posteromedial cortex (PMC), a core structure of the default mode network, during various conditions of internally directed (e.g., autobiographical memory) as opposed t...

The potential of stem cells to generate all cell types while retaining the ability to self-renew has attracted much attention; a degree of focus comparable to that of developmental biologists on the capacity of an egg to produce a full organism. This interest has been enhanced by the prospective biomedical applications of stem-cell-derived technologies. As such, efforts are under way to identif...

We endow Brewka’s prioritised default logic (PDL) with argumentation semantics using the ASPIC framework for structured argumentation. We prove that the conclusions of the justified arguments correspond to the prioritised default extensions in a normatively rational manner. Argumentation semantics for PDL will allow for the application of argument game proof theories to the process of inference...

The purpose of this dictionary is to describe items in the tool thereby assisting raters to score study quality. Due to under-reporting or lack of clarity in the primary study, raters will need to make judgements about the extent that bias may be present. When making judgements about each component, raters should form their opinion based upon information contained in the study rather than makin...

Judgment Aggregation studies how agents take a collective decision on a certain number of issues based on their individual opinions. In recent years, a line of research in Judgment Aggregation investigates how to model this framework within a logical calculus — usually designed ad hoc for this purpose. By contrast, in this thesis we show how it is possible to translate any aggregation problem f...