What Is Going through Your Mind? Metacognitive Events Classification in Human-Agent Interactions

For an agent, either human or artificial, to show intelligent interactive behaviour implies assessments of the reliability of own and others’ thoughts, feelings and beliefs. Agents capable of these robust evaluations are able to adequately interpret their own and others’ cognitive and emotional processes, anticipate future actions, and improve their decision-making and interactive performances across domains and contexts. Reliable instruments to assess interlocutors’ mindful capacities for monitoring and regulation - metacognition - in human-agent interaction in real-time and continuously are of crucial importance however challenging to design. The presented study reports Concurrent Think Aloud (CTA) experiments in order to access and evaluate metacognitive dispositions and attitudes of participants in human-agent interactions. A typology of metacognitive events related to the ‘verbalized’ monitoring, interpretation, reflection and regulation activities observed in a multimodal dialogue has been designed, and serves as a valid tool to identify relation between participants’ behaviour analysed in terms of ISO 24617-2 compliant dialogue acts and the corresponding metacognitive indicators.