Meta-reasoning: deciding which game to play, which problem to solve, and when to quit

Workshop Description

People are general purpose problem solvers. We obtain food and shelter, manage companies, solve moral dilemmas, spend years toiling away at thorny math problems, and even adopt arbitrary problems through puzzles and games. The cognitive flexibility which allows us to represent and reason about such a wide range of problems, often referenced as a distinguishing feature of human intelligence, presents us with an especially ubiquitous one: deciding which problem to solve. The meta-level problem of what problem to choose exists, in part, because people have limited problem solving resources. While this challenge has been examined through various lenses across cognitive science, implicit in many of these perspectives is the notion of bounded rationality. Given our limited time and energy, how do we decide which problems are worthwhile and when we should quit to pursue something new?

We will offer a forum with leading researchers in computational cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy to engage the broader cognitive science community with an interdisciplinary discussion on problem selection grounded in recent empirical advances. Our speakers span a range of career stages. The program will include several sessions, each beginning with an invited talk. During the talk component, speakers will be encouraged to engage with one of the following guiding questions:

• What role should the concept of rationality play in the study of meta-reasoning for problem selection?

• What is the relationship between individual and collective problem selection? How and to what extent does social or cultural context shape problem selection?

• How is meta-reasoning for problem selection shaped by learning and development?

• How does our sense of agency or identity influence the problems we consider and choose to solve, especially over long timescales where we may not know how our choices will ultimately change us?

Following each talk, we will moderate an interactive discussion in which both speakers and audience members engage with the central question relevant to the session. Our goal is to create a stimulating environment that is principally a workshop - where researchers of all career stages can engage in the questions and early answers at the cutting-edge of research on the topic of meta-reasoning for problem selection.