Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. In this paper we report preliminary results on how people revise or update a previously held set of beliefs. When intelligent agents learn new things which conflict with their current belief set, they must revise their belief set. When the new information does not conflict, they merely must update their belief set. Various AI theories have been proposed to achieve these processes.
Results indicate that syntactic form affects belief revision choices.
Further, contrary to earlier studies, subjects are sometimes reluctant to accept that a sentence changes from false to true, but they are willing to accept that it would change from true to false.