{"pk":50451,"title":"Deciphering human meta-cognition in creative problem-solving","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Previous studies on human meta-cognition, represented by confidence in perceptual decisions, often focus on over-simplified environments that yield experiences with limited semantic dimensions. However, in real-life situations such as solving a new problem, people need to make sequential decisions in a complex environment, exploring vast combinations of actions that unfold over time. How do people make meta-cognitive evaluations out of the rich, high-dimensional cognitive experiences in such situations? Here we develop a computational method that models each individual's meta-cognitive ratings (e.g., difficulty) of problem-solving experience in a visual puzzle game, using information-theoretic metrics derived from their own action sequences. Individuals are assumed to be Bayesian to update their \"thought-space distributions\" with their own behavioral distributions on different semantic categories. Our results show that information discrepancies between beliefs at different moments can predict individual differences in self-reported difficulty.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Psychology; Problem Solving; Bayesian modeling; Computational Modeling; Statistics"}],"section":"Member Abstracts with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/77x5c88p","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Yang-Fan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Lu","name_suffix":"","institution":"Peking University","department":""},{"first_name":"Qianli","middle_name":"","last_name":"Yang","name_suffix":"","institution":"Chinese Academy of Sciences","department":""},{"first_name":"Hang","middle_name":"","last_name":"Zhang","name_suffix":"","institution":"Peking University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/50451/galley/38413/download/"}]}