How metacognitive architectures remember their own thoughts: a systematic scoping review

Abstract

Abstract Metacognition has gained significant attention for its potential to enhance autonomy and adaptability of artificial agents but remains a fragmented field: diverse theories, terminologies, and design choices have led to disjointed developments and limited comparability across systems. Existing overviews remain at a conceptual level that is undiscerning to the underlying algorithms, representations, and their respective effectiveness. We address this gap by performing a systematic scoping review. Reports were included if they described techniques enabling Computational Metacognitive Architectures (CMAs) to model, store, remember, and process their episodic metacognitive experiences , one of Flavell’s (1979) three foundational components of metacognition. Searches were conducted in 16 databases between December 2023 and June 2024. Data were charted using a 20-item framework considering pertinent aspects and analysed via structured narrative synthesis. A total of 101 reports on 35 distinct CMAs were included. Our findings show that metacognitive experiences may boost system performance and explainability, e.g., via self-repair. However, lack of standardisation and limited evaluations may hinder progress: only 17% of CMAs were quantitatively evaluated regarding this review’s focus, and significant terminological inconsistency limits cross-architecture synthesis. Systems also varied widely in memory content, data types, and employed algorithms. Limitations include the non-iterative nature of the search query, heterogeneous data availability, and an under-representation of sub-symbolic CMAs. Future research should focus on standardisation and evaluation, e.g., via community-driven challenges, and on transferring promising principles to emergent systems.