Cognitive emulation in expert system design

Bias in human judgement under uncertainty?

The claim is frequently made that human judgement and reasoning are vulnerable to cognitive biases. Such biases are assumed to be inherent in that they are attributed to the nature of the mental processes that produce judgement. In this paper, we review the psychological evidence for this claim in the context of the debate concerning human judgemental competence under uncertainty. We consider recent counter-arguments which suggest that the evidence for cognitive biases may be dependent on observations of performance on inappropriate tasks and by comparisons with inappropriate normative standards. We also consider the practical implications for the design of decision support systems.

Expert systems and hypertext

Expert systems and hypertext are technologies which are coming together. This paper reviews the strengths and weaknesses of expert systems and hypertext. Then the complementarity of the two is both argued and illustrated. Translating expertise from documents into expert systems is difficult, but hypertext systems exploit the information in documents. Expert systems don't explain their decisions as well as some people would like, but hypertext is basically designed to provide explanations. On the other hand, people have difficulty deciding what links to follow in hypertext, but an expert system is designed to help people make decisions. When a hypertext reader is confused as to what step to follow next, an expert system might review the path taken thus far and suggest the appropriate next step. An annotated bibliography of the principal literature is provided.