Rationality Enhancement Conference Paper 2021

Have I done enough planning or should I plan more?

Heruiqi planning strategies

People’s decisions about how to allocate their limited computational resources are essential to human intelligence. An important component of this metacognitive ability is deciding whether to continue thinking about what to do and move on to the next decision. Here, we show that people acquire this ability through learning and reverse-engineer the underlying learning mechanisms. Using a process-tracing paradigm that externalises human planning, we find that people quickly adapt how much planning they perform to the cost and benefit of planning. To discover the underlying metacognitive learning mechanisms we augmented a set of reinforcement learning models with metacognitive features and performed Bayesian model selection. Our results suggest that the metacognitive ability to adjust the amount of planning might be learned through a policy-gradient mechanism that is guided by metacognitive pseudo-rewards that communicate the value of planning.

Author(s): He, Ruiqi, and Jain, Yash Raj, and Lieder, Falk
Book Title: Workshop on Metacognition in the Age of AI. Thirty-fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
Year: 2021
Month: December
Project(s):
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (conference)
Event Name: Workshop on Metacognition in the Age of AI. Thirty-fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
State: Accepted
Electronic Archiving: grant_archive
How Published: Long Paper
Language: English

BibTex

@conference{HeJainLieder2021NIPS-Planning,
  title = {Have I done enough planning or should I plan more?},
  booktitle = {Workshop on Metacognition in the Age of AI. Thirty-fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
  abstract = {People’s decisions about how to allocate their limited computational resources are essential to human intelligence. An important component of this metacognitive ability is deciding whether to continue thinking about what to do and move on to the next decision. Here, we show that people acquire this ability through learning and reverse-engineer the underlying learning mechanisms. Using a process-tracing paradigm that externalises human planning, we find that people quickly adapt how much planning they perform to the cost and benefit of planning. To discover the underlying metacognitive learning mechanisms we augmented a set of reinforcement learning models with metacognitive features and performed Bayesian model selection. Our results suggest that the metacognitive ability to adjust the amount of planning might be learned through a policy-gradient mechanism that is guided by metacognitive pseudo-rewards that communicate the value of planning.},
  howpublished = {Long Paper},
  month = dec,
  year = {2021},
  slug = {hejainlieder2021nips-planning},
  author = {He, Ruiqi and Jain, Yash Raj and Lieder, Falk},
  month_numeric = {12}
}