Article Two: Thinking about Thinking: Mathematical Modelling of Mind and Meta-Cognition


We discussed in previous article that mind and cognition are two pillars of psychology. Computational and quantitative psychology are two emerging areas in psychology. While there are many health care and behavioural aspects of psychology focused on humanity and social sciences there are equally important quantitative and computational aspects. Computational and Mathematical aspects focus on modelling of mind, modelling of cognition and even systemic modelling of thinking. In this article, we will discuss about mathematical modelling of mind and meta-cognition.  Metacognition is about understanding one’s thought process and senses. As meta word refers it is cognition about cognition. It is awareness about awareness or thinking about thinking. Hence it focuses on understanding or decoding process of cognition. One cannot model mind without understanding process of cognition. When we consider mind as an intelligent agent, it becomes important to understand what is an intelligent agent. In typical Artificial Intelligent terms and agent is one that has actuators and sensors. While sensors sense the world, actuators take action of the environment. These actions change the state of environment as well as agent. Thus, there is transition in state of environment due to action taken by an agent. Metacognition understand the process of building different types of knowledge components like procedural, declarative and conditional knowledge. While modelling mind we need to understand the information acquisition process, information processing and response generation. These responses are driven by not only information acquired but the context and past learning. Even information retrieval and prioritisation of events play a key role in this modelling. Can mind be modelled as an Intelligent agent? How can we establish relationships between different inputs and outputs? These are some key questions for discussion. While modelling the mind we need to take systemic perspective. We will try to focus on quantitative psychology while modelling mind. Our focus of discussion will be identifying the expected and actual response of mind. It will encompass constrained selection, deliberate rejection and multi-level association. We will discuss some past efforts by researchers in this direction in subsequent articles.

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