Aspects of Metacognitive Self-Awareness in Maryland Virtual Patient

This paper describes Maryland Virtual Patient (MVP), a simulation and tutoring environment developed to support training cognitive decision making in clinical medicine. MVP is implemented as a society of agents, with one role – that of the trainee – played by a human and other roles played by artificial intelligent agents. In order to make the trainee’s experience as similar as possible to the traditional medical training environment, MVP is implemented as a collection of knowledge-based models of simulated human-like perception, reasoning and action processes. MVP operation involves metacognition: for example, the MVP virtual patient is aware of the physiological state of its body, of its physiological and character traits as well as of lacunae in its knowledge about the world and about language. This self-awareness influences the virtual patient’s reasoning and actions. In this paper we illustrate the role of metacognitive self-awareness in the overall operation of MVP.