A Summary of "The Motivational and Meta-Cognitive Subsystems" from "A Tutorial on CLARION 5.0"

Citation
Sun, Ron. "Chapter 4: The Motivational and Meta-Cognitive Subsystems." "A Tutorial on CLARION 5.0." Department of Cognitive Science. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. 6 Oct. 2009. 
http://www.sts.rpi.edu/~rsun/sun.tutorial.pdf

Summary / Assessment
In this chapter, the Motivational Subsystem (MS) and the Meta-Cognitive Subsystem (MCS) of the CLARION architecture are described. The MS is concerned with an agent’s drives and their interactions (i.e. – why an agent does what it does and why it chooses any particular action over another). The MCS controls and regulates cognitive processes. The MCS accomplishes this, for example, by setting goals for the agent and by managing ongoing processes of learning and interactions with the surrounding environment.

Dr. Sun mentions that motivational and meta-level processes are required for an agent to meet the following criteria when performing actions: sustainability, purposefulness, focus, and adaptivity. Sustainability refers to an agent attending to basic needs for survival (i.e. – hunger, thirst, and avoiding danger). Purposefulness refers to an agent selecting activities that will accomplish goals, as opposed to selecting activities completely randomly. Focus refers to an agent’s need to focus its activities on fulfilling a specific purpose. Adaptivity refers to the need of an agent to adapt (i.e. – to learn) to improve its sustainability, purposefulness, and focus.

When modeling a cognitive agent, it is important to include the following considerations concerning drives. Proportional Activation: Activation of drives should be proportional to offsets or deficits within the agent (such as the degree of the lack of nourishment). Opportunism: Opportunities must be factored in when choosing between alternative actions (ex: availability of water may lead an agent to choose drinking water over gathering food, provided that the food deficit is not too high). Contiguity of Actions: A tendency to continue the current action sequence to avoid the overhead of switching to a different action sequence (i.e. – avoid “thrashing”). Persistence: Actions to satisfy a drive should persist beyond minimum satisfaction. Interruption When Necessary: Actions for a higher priority drive should be interrupted when a more urgent drive arises. Combination of Preferences: Preferences resulting from different drives could be combined to generate a higher-order preference. Performing a “compromise candidate” action may not be the best for any single drive, but is best in terms of the combined preference.

Specific drives are then discussed. Drives are segmented into three categories: Low-Level Drives, High-Level Drives, and Derived Secondary Drives. Low-Level drives include physiological needs such as: get-food, get-water, avoid-danger, get-sleep, and reproduce. Low-Level drives also include “saturation drives” such as: avoid-water-saturation, and avoid-food-saturation. High-Level drives include “needs” such as: belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization (and others from Maslow’s needs hierarchy). Derived Secondary Drives include: gradually acquired drives through conditioning (i.e. – associating a secondary goal to a primary drive), and externally set drives (i.e. – drives resulting from the desire to please superiors in a work environment).

Meta-cognition refers to one’s knowledge of one’s own cognitive process. It also refers to the monitoring and orchestration of cognitive processes in the service of some concrete goal or objective. These concepts are operationalized within CLARION’s MCS through the following processes: 1) Behavioral Aims: which set goals and their reinforcements, 2) Information Filtering: which determines the selection of input values from the environment, 3) Information Acquisition: which selects learning methods, 4) Information Utilization: which refers to reasoning, 5) Outcome Selection: or determining the appropriate outputs, 6) Cognitive Modes: or the selection of explicit processing, implicit processing, or combination thereof, and 7)Parameter Settings: such as parameters for learning capability (i.e. – intelligence level).