Anticipatory Thinking: A Metacognitive Capability
This work addresses risk management in cognitive architectures, but it is incremental as it builds on existing frameworks like MIDCA.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling cognitive systems to assess and manage risk by defining anticipatory thinking as a metacognitive goal reasoning mechanism, resulting in a three-step process and a numeric risk assessment method for modifying plans.
Anticipatory thinking is a complex cognitive process for assessing and managing risk in many contexts. Humans use anticipatory thinking to identify potential future issues and proactively take actions to manage their risks. In this paper we define a cognitive systems approach to anticipatory thinking as a metacognitive goal reasoning mechanism. The contributions of this paper include (1) defining anticipatory thinking in the MIDCA cognitive architecture, (2) operationalizing anticipatory thinking as a three step process for managing risk in plans, and (3) a numeric risk assessment calculating an expected cost-benefit ratio for modifying a plan with anticipatory actions.