Rationality Enhancement Conference Paper 2021

Promoting metacognitive learning through systematic reflection

Conference promoting reflection

People are able to learn clever cognitive strategies through trial and error from small amounts of experience. This is facilitated by people's ability to reflect on their own thinking which is known as metacognition. To examine the effects of deliberate systematic metacognitive reflection on how people learn how to plan, the experimental group was guided to systematically reflect on their decision-making process after every third decision. We found that participants assisted by reflection prompts learned to plan better faster. Moreover, we found that reflection led to immediate improvements in the participants' planning strategies. Our preliminary results do suggest that deliberate metacognitive reflection can help people discover clever cognitive strategies from very small amounts of experience. Understanding the role of reflection in human learning is a promising approach for making reinforcement learning more sample efficient in both humans and machines.

Author(s): Frederic Becker and Falk Lieder
Book Title: Workshop on Metacognition in the Age of AI. Thirty-fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
Year: 2021
Month: December
Day: 7-10
Project(s):
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (conference)
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.24598.88642
Event Name: 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021)
Event Place: Virtual (originally Montreal, Canada)
State: Published
URL: https://neurips.cc/virtual/2021/workshop/21845
Electronic Archiving: grant_archive
Language: English

BibTex

@conference{Becker2021Promoting,
  title = {Promoting metacognitive learning through systematic reflection},
  booktitle = {Workshop on Metacognition in the Age of AI. Thirty-fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
  abstract = {People are able to learn clever cognitive strategies through trial and error from small amounts of experience. This is facilitated by people's ability to reflect on their own thinking which is known as metacognition. To examine the effects of deliberate systematic metacognitive reflection on how people learn how to plan, the experimental group was guided to systematically reflect on their decision-making process after every third decision. We found that participants assisted by reflection prompts learned to plan better faster. Moreover, we found that reflection led to immediate improvements in the participants' planning strategies. Our preliminary results do suggest that deliberate metacognitive reflection can help people discover clever cognitive strategies from very small amounts of experience. Understanding the role of reflection in human learning is a promising approach for making reinforcement learning more sample efficient in both humans and machines.},
  month = dec,
  year = {2021},
  slug = {beckarlieder2021nips2021-metacognitive},
  author = {Becker, Frederic and Lieder, Falk},
  url = {https://neurips.cc/virtual/2021/workshop/21845},
  month_numeric = {12}
}