Metareasoning: Thinking about Thinking

The capacity to think about our own thinking may lie at the heart of what it means to be both human and intelligent. Philosophers and cognitive scientists have investigated these matters for many years. Researchers in artificial intelligence have gone further, attempting to implement actual machines that mimic, simulate, and perhaps even replicate this capacity, called metareasoning. In this volume, leading authorities offer a variety of perspectives–drawn from philosophy, cognitive psychology, and computer science–on reasoning about the reasoning process. The book offers a simple model of reasoning about reason as a framework for its discussions. Following this framework, the contributors consider metalevel control of computational activities, introspective monitoring, distributed metareasoning, and, putting all these aspects of metareasoning together, models of the self. Taken together, the chapters offer an integrated narrative on metareasoning themes from both artificial intelligence and cognitive science perspectives.

Table of Contents

Part I Basic Themes
Chapter 1 Metareasoning
Chapter 2 There’s No “Me” in “Meta”—Or Is There?
Chapter 3 Metareasoning and Bounded Rationality

Part II Metalevel Control
Chapter 4 Learning Expertise with Bounded Rationality and Self-Awareness
Chapter 5 Controlling Deliberation in Coordinators
Chapter 6 Goal-Directed Metacontrol for Integrated Procedure Learning
Chapter 7 Metareasoning for Multispectral Satellite Image Interpretation
Chapter 8 Metareasoning as a Formal Computational Problem

Part III Introspective Monitoring
Chapter 9 Metareasoning, Monitoring, and Self-Explanation
Chapter 10 Metareasoning for Self-Adaptation in Intelligent Agents
Chapter 11 Using Introspective Reasoning to Improve CBR System Performance
Chapter 12 The Metacognitive Loop and Reasoning about Anomalies

Part IV Distributed Metareasoning
Chapter 13 Coordinating Agents’ Metalevel Control
Chapter 14 The Role of Metareasoning in Achieving Effective Multiagent Coordination
Chapter 15 Distributed Metamanagement for Self-Protection and Self-Explanation
Chapter 16 Weighted Prediction Divergence for Metareasoning

Part V Models of Self
Chapter 17 Metareasoning as an Integral Part of Commonsense and Autocognitive Reasoning
Chapter 18 Robotic Models of Self
Chapter 19 Anthropomorphic Self-Models for Metareasoning Agents
Chapter 20 Varieties of Metacognition in Natural and Artificial Systems