Decision as Choice of Potential Intentions

Multi-agent systems research has been drawing innovative insights from other disciplines such as philosophy and cognitive science. While cognitive studies have shown that over 95% of human decisions conform to the recognition-primed decision making (RPD) model, there still lacks a formal mentalistic description of RPD, which has raised an interoperability issue when a team is formed from agents with different RPD implementations. The objective of this study is to establish a formal connection between agent mental attitudes and the meta-cognition concepts as used in RPD. We adopt the intentional attitudes as introduced in the Shared Plans theory to model the RPD process and its cognitive activities from teamwork perspective. Such a formal analysis helps to resolve the ambiguities in the original description of the RPD model, it also demonstrates a viable approach where connectionists could formally study meta-cognition concepts and team cognition concepts by agent-based modeling.