Transcript Fabio Paglieri / ISTC-CNR, Roma Beyond temptations and distractions: Metacognitive skills for inter-temporal coordination CNCC conference “Fallibilities, illusion and metacognition” Paris, 12-13 July 2007

Fabio Paglieri
/
ISTC-CNR, Roma
Beyond temptations and distractions:
Metacognitive skills for
inter-temporal coordination
CNCC conference “Fallibilities, illusion and metacognition”
Paris, 12-13 July 2007
Take-home messages
• Puzzle: How do we manage mastery of
long-term planning, in spite of our
greedy and short-sighted nature?
• How do we resist temptations and
distractions, in favor of long-term
goals?
• Answer: A variety of skills enable
inter-temporal coordination in humans,
and metacognitive capacities play a key
role in this process.
F. Paglieri – Beyond temptations and distractions (Paris, 13 July 2007)
Outline
• Defining inter-temporal coordination
• Why is ITC a problem?
• Why is ITC valuable?
• How do we achieve it?
– Cognitive skills
– Metacognitive skills
•Metarepresentational (?)
•Non-metarepresentational (?)
F. Paglieri – Beyond temptations and distractions (Paris, 13 July 2007)
Defining ITC
• Inter-temporal coordination (ITC) is the
capacity to act in the present in view of
some goal which is remote in time
• Success: Buying an airplane ticket to Paris
some months ago in order to be here today
• Failure: Giving up my diet while in Paris
because I am overcome by my obsession for
croissants (temptation)
• Failure: Delaying my PhD dissertation
because I used up my time submitting papers
to conferences (distraction)
F. Paglieri – Beyond temptations and distractions (Paris, 13 July 2007)
Is ITC a problem ?
• For many scholars ITC is remarkable but not
problematic, because its solution is obvious
and ingrained in human nature: planning and
future-directed intentions
• Many theories of intentionality basically tries
to show how long-term plans are turned into
immediate actions (e.g., Bratman planning
theory of intentions)
• I suggest this methodological stance should be
reversed: What really needs explaining is how
do we manage to be so good at planning, in the
face of our obvious inclination to act in view
of immediate environmental demands and present
motivational drives?
F. Paglieri – Beyond temptations and distractions (Paris, 13 July 2007)
The gospel for planning
In the beginning was the Plan, and the
Plan was with Man, and the Plan was Man.
«Begin with plans and planning. The central fact is that we
are planning agents. We frequently settle in advance on more
or less complex plans concerning the future, and then these
plans guide our later conduct. […] Our need for plans
concerning the future is rooted in two very general needs.
[First,] we need ways to allow deliberation and rational
is the
solution,
reflection toPlanning
influence action
beyond
the present. Second,
we have pressing needs
coordination.
notforthe
problemTo achieve complex
goals I must coordinate my present and future activities.
And I need also to coordinate my activities with yours. […]
Our capacities as planners help us meet these needs. We
facilitate coordination in part by constructing larger plans
for the future, plans that help coordinate both our own
activities over time and our activities with the activities
of others. And by settling now on a plan for later I enable
my present deliberation to influence my later conduct; I
thereby extend the influence of my deliberation beyond the
present moment» (Bratman, 1987: 2-3).
F. Paglieri – Beyond temptations and distractions (Paris, 13 July 2007)
From plans to action
Planning
Intentional action
Future-directed
Present-directed (Bratman, 1987)
Intentions
Executive representations (Bach, 1978)
Prior intentions
Intentions-in-action (Searle, 1983)
Prospective
Immediate intentions (Brand, 1984)
Distal
Proximal intentions (Mele, 1992)
FDI
PDI
Motor intentions (Pacherie, 2006)
F. Paglieri – Beyond temptations and distractions (Paris, 13 July 2007)
No “natural born planners” !
• Biologically speaking, we are attuned to
the demands of the present environment,
often via the mediation of internal drives
that map such demands into our own body
(hunger, thirst, lust, fear, pleasure)
• Some very important anticipatory mechanisms
are likely to be innate: e.g., anticipation
for active vision (cf. Muckly)
• However, this is short-term anticipation of
highly specific features, and cannot
account for our capacities at ITC
F. Paglieri – Beyond temptations and distractions (Paris, 13 July 2007)
No “natural born planners” !
• In short, we are very sophisticated,
internally modulated reactive systems with
some in-grained short-term anticipatory
skills
• Given this biological legacy, how come we
are so good at long-term planning?
• How do we manage to keep steady?
• The “hard problem” of intentionality?
• ITC as farsighted virtual machine running
on a short-sighted biological one
F. Paglieri – Beyond temptations and distractions (Paris, 13 July 2007)
Motivational value
• Three features of goals:
– Motivational value
– Pragmatic importance
– Temporal urgency
• A goal is motivationally valuable when its
achievement is rewarding in itself,
regardless any further ends of the agent
• Satisfaction / disappointment: compare
slurping an ice-cream with taking the bus
for getting to the ice-cream seller
• Both long-term aims (happiness) and shortterm drives (pleasure) can be valuable
F. Paglieri – Beyond temptations and distractions (Paris, 13 July 2007)
MV is not inherited
• Principle of non-inheritance: The means do not
inherit the motivational value of the ends
• To have my ice-cream, I can choose among
different means (bus, car, metro, taxi), none
of which makes a difference in itself
• Excellent for ensuring flexibility
Planning is the problem,
• Corollary 1: There
are many
(pursued) goals
not the
solution
that are not motivationally valuable
• Corollary 2: To persevere in his plans, the
agent must be able to follow a course of action
which is not always consistent with the
strongest current motivational drive
• Temptations are highly valuable goals that, if
pursued, would jeopardize some long-term aim
F. Paglieri – Beyond temptations and distractions (Paris, 13 July 2007)
Is ITC a good thing ?
• Deliberation is costly in terms of resources,
so it is rational to settle deliberation at
some point and not re-open it (Bratman, 1987)
• ITC serves to accumulate efforts and labours to
achieve complex objectives
• ITC makes the subject more predictable, and
this increases cooperation in social species
(e.g. humans)
• ITC grants partial emancipation from the
environment, so that the subject can start
adapting the environment to his needs, rather
than just vice versa
F. Paglieri – Beyond temptations and distractions (Paris, 13 July 2007)
Cognitive mechanisms for ITC
• Some processes that favour ITC are merely
cognitive (i.e. non-metacognitive)
• Sunk costs effects (Arkes, Blumer, 1985):
persevering in a previous plan even when better
options are available, in order to avoid
“losing” resources already spent (fallacy?)
• Reduction of cognitive dissonance (Festinger,
1957): avoidance of choices that would conflict
with previous decisions, in order to minimize
the expected cognitive dissonance
• Increase in the value of chosen goals (testable
in AI): the motivational value of a goal is
increased just in virtue of having been chosen
F. Paglieri – Beyond temptations and distractions (Paris, 13 July 2007)
Metarepresentational skills for ITC
• Regardless any non-metacognitive mechanisms for
ITC, it is only with metacognition that agents
make a step change in this respect
• As social metacognition enables the subject
with powerful tools for social influence
(Krebs, Dawkins, 1984; Baron-Cohen, 1999;
Sperber, 2001; Paglieri, Castelfranchi, in
preparation), so self-directed metacognition
allows the subject to self-influence his own
intentional conduct
• This seems to require a representation of the
agent’s internal states as such, i.e. a form of
proper metarepresentation (cf. J. Proust)
F. Paglieri – Beyond temptations and distractions (Paris, 13 July 2007)
Self-influence for ITC
• Environmental SI: modification of the
ecological context of action in such a way
as to favour ITC (e.g. avoiding commercial
streets to prevent compulsive shopping)
• Persuasive SI: ‘arguing with oneself’ to
support long-term aims and discourage
fleeting fancies (e.g. focusing on expected
rewards, downplaying current alternatives)
• Direct / deontic SI: self-prescribed code
on when to persevere and when to relinquish
(e.g. the athlete spurring herself at the
top of effort)
F. Paglieri – Beyond temptations and distractions (Paris, 13 July 2007)
Importance, urgency, and ITC
• Goals are characterized not only by their
motivational value, i.e. how much desirable
they are in and by themselves
• Pragmatic importance: how many and how much
valuable are the further ends to which a goal
is instrumental
• Temporal urgency: how close in time is the
moment when a given goal will no longer be
achievable by the subject
• Both importance and urgency influence
deliberation and action through forms of
metacognitive tracking, i.e. the capacity of
the agent to keep track of long-term ends and
impending deadlines of his own goals
F. Paglieri – Beyond temptations and distractions (Paris, 13 July 2007)
Metacognitive skills for ITC
• Assessing importance and urgency involves:
– Some awareness of the fact that a given
internal state is a goal
– Some awareness that there are further ends to
which that particular goal happens to be
instrumental (for importance)
– Some awareness that there is some deadline
attached to that particular goal (for
urgency)
• None of these requires either explicit
metarepresentation, or comprehensive mastery of
the agent’s own intentional structure (e.g.
wandering in the kitchen with a sense of
purpose but no exact recollection of the goal)
• ‘Motivational feelings’ ?
F. Paglieri – Beyond temptations and distractions (Paris, 13 July 2007)
Metacognitive skills for ITC
• The dynamics of importance favor ITC, by
making the agent sensitive to further
ends that would be fostered or
jeopardized by present decisions
• The dynamics of urgency resist ITC, by
making the agent alert to any fleeting
opportunity so as to catch it in time
• Summary on goal dynamics and ITC:
– MV contrasts ITC
– TU contrasts ITC
– PI supports ITC
F. Paglieri – Beyond temptations and distractions (Paris, 13 July 2007)
ITC: A tale of two minds ?
• The problem of ITC indicate two conflicting
tendencies in the control of behavior: shortterm responsiveness to the environment, and
long-term coordination of intentional action
• Bleak prospects on human rationality: Is
cognition the slave of too many masters?
• A more optimistic outlook: This is the metacognitive mirror of a balance that any living
organism needs achieving – the balance between
fast compliance with the constraints of an ever
changing environment, and slow modification of
that same environment for the agent’s own needs
F. Paglieri – Beyond temptations and distractions (Paris, 13 July 2007)
Open issues
• Consequences of this analysis of ITC for the
notion of “willpower” and “strength of will”
(Frankfurt, 1988; Holton, 1999; 2003)
• Connections with the analysis of intertemporal consistency of the agent’s choices
in economics (Ainsle, 2001; 2006)
• What is the developmental and evolutionary
story behind this functional picture? How can
it be empirically studied? (e.g. long-term
anticipation vs. intentional perseverance)
• Further thoughts on the distinction between
metacognition and metarepresentation (Proust,
2003; in press)
• Connections with empirical studies on the
experience of conscious will in the online
control of behavior (continued)
F. Paglieri – Beyond temptations and distractions (Paris, 13 July 2007)
Conscious will revisited ?
• Recent surge of interest in psychology
and neurosciences for studies on
conscious control of ongoing actions
(Libet, Wegner, Haggard, Frith, Lau)
• Bottom-line: The role of consciousness
has been overrated, re: action control
• Is this really the case? If so, what is
the function of consciousness (if any)
for the sake of our intentional conduct?
F. Paglieri – Beyond temptations and distractions (Paris, 13 July 2007)
Conscious will revisited ?
• HP: Some form of consciousness, e.g.
metacognitive awareness of one’s own
volitions, is instrumental to achieve
ITC over long-term behavior, and not for
online guidance of immediate action
• Corollary: Current emphasis on the
latter may result in a methodological
bias – if so, different experimental
paradigms should be devised for
empirical study of conscious will
• Just speculation, but maybe warranting
further investigation …
F. Paglieri – Beyond temptations and distractions (Paris, 13 July 2007)
Fabio Paglieri – [email protected]
Thanks for your
kind attention.
CNCC conference “Fallibilities, illusion and metacognition”
Paris, 12-13 July 2007