Abstract
Executive function has become an important concept in explanations of psychiatric disorders, but we currently lack comprehensive models of normal executive function and of its malfunctions. Here we illustrate how defeasible logical analysis can aid progress in this area. We illustrate using autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as example disorders, and show how logical analysis reveals commonalities between linguistic and non-linguistic behaviours within each disorder, and how contrasting sub-components of executive function are involved across disorders. This analysis reveals how logical analysis is as applicable to fast, automatic and unconscious reasoning as it is to slow deliberate cogitation.
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Notes
It may not be obvious that this is a planning problem at all, but Sect. 3.2 will make clear why this is so.
Section 5.1 will explain the connection with planning and closed world reasoning.
The formalism introduces just what is necessary to model the various tasks. A fully general formalism would have to use the ‘event calculus’, for which see van Lambalgen and Hamm (2004). Our formulation uses predicates which can take formulas as arguments. Strictly speaking this is not allowed in first order logic, but there are a number of technical tricks to deal with this issue. A general approach is given in (van Lambalgen and Hamm 2004 Chapter 6).
The abnormality ab b may be different for each concrete φ but in order not to overload notation we will not indicate this explicitly.
Five out of six subjects performed normally on this task.
There are 20 cards for each of the ‘go’ and ‘no go’ stimuli, so it is not a matter of building up a response bias.
This is a classic experimental paradigm for investigating the acquisition of temporal notions in children. See Berman and Slobin (1994) for methods, results, and last but not least, the frog pictures themselves.
One would expect that the re-planning involved in reversing the event order leads to a characteristic EEG signal. This is currently being tested (in a different but related context) at the F.C. Donders Centre for Neuroimaging Nijmegen.
See for example (van Lambalgen and Hamm 2004, p. 112–114) for a discussion of when clauses which establishes this point.
This said, we acknowledge that other approaches to autism such as Frith and Happé’s ‘weak central coherence’ theory (Happé 1994) need to be formalised as well to allow full comparisons. We have also said little about ‘simulation-based’ approaches (Harris 2000) which provide an alternative to ‘theory of mind’ explanations for performance in false belief tasks.
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Stenning, K., van Lambalgen, M. Logic in the study of psychiatric disorders: executive function and rule-following. Topoi 26, 97–114 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-006-9012-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-006-9012-6