Second Workshop on Metacognitive Prediction of AI Behavior Exploring Cognitive Attributes in Financial Decision-Making Mallika Mainali, Drexel University, Philadelphia, P A, 19104, USA Rosina O. Weber, Drexel University, Philadelphia, P A, 19104, USA Abstract--Cognitive attributes are fundamental to metacognition, shaping how individuals process information, evaluate choices, and make decisions. T o develop metacognitive artificial intelligence (AI) models that reflect human reasoning, it is essential to account for the attributes that influence reasoning patterns and decision-maker behavior, often leading to different or even conflicting choices. This makes it crucial to incorporate cognitive attributes in designing AI models that align with human decision-making processes, especially in high-stakes domains such as finance, where decisions have significant real-world consequences. However, existing AI alignment research has primarily focused on value alignment, often overlooking the role of individual cognitive attributes that distinguish decision-makers. T o address this issue, this paper (1) analyzes the literature on cognitive attributes, (2) establishes five criteria for defining them, and (3) categorizes 19 domain-specific cognitive attributes relevant to financial decision-making.

Designing seamless, frictionless user experiences has long been a dominant trend in both applied behavioral science and artificial intelligence (AI), in which the goal of making desirable actions easy and efficient informs efforts to minimize friction in user experiences. However, in some settings, friction can be genuinely beneficial, such as the insertion of deliberate delays to increase reflection, preventing individuals from resorting to automatic or biased behaviors, and enhancing opportunities for unexpected discoveries. More recently, the popularization and availability of AI on a widespread scale has only increased the need to examine how friction can help or hinder users of AI; it also suggests a need to consider how positive friction can benefit AI practitioners, both during development processes (e.g., working with diverse teams) and to inform how AI is designed into offerings. This paper first proposes a "positive friction" model that can help characterize how friction is currently beneficial in user and developer experiences with AI, diagnose the potential need for friction where it may not yet exist in these contexts, and inform how positive friction can be used to generate solutions, especially as advances in AI continue to be progress and new opportunities emerge. It then explores this model in the context of AI users and developers by proposing the value of taking a hybrid "AI+human" lens, and concludes by suggesting questions for further exploration.

Belief is a special kind of human power. Agustin Fuentes, an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame, eloquently claims as much in his recent book Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being. It's the "most prominent, promising, and dangerous capacity humanity has evolved," he writes, the power to "see and feel and know something--an idea, a vision, a necessity, a possibility, a truth--that is not immediately present to the senses, and then to invest, wholly and authentically, in that'something' so that it becomes one's reality." A great example of this is the widespread and intuitive idea that we have free will. Most people grow up with the notion that they are, in some sense, responsible for their thoughts and actions because, unlike animals, humans can think about their choices.

In an amazing show of self-control, cuttlefish can resist the impulse to eat a morsel of food if it means getting to eat two morsels later on, a new study shows. In experiments, the marine molluscs passed a variation of the'marshmallow test' – originally used in the 1970s to measure a child's ability to delay gratification. In the original Stanford experiment, pre-school kids were given one marshmallow and told they could eat it straight away, or, if they waited 20 minutes, have two marshmallows instead. For this new study, scientists performed a'fishy version' of the legendary experiment using shrimp instead of marshmallows. They found the creatures could wait over two minutes to get their preferred type of shrimp – and that the cuttlefish that could delay gratification the longest were the most intelligent, as determined by a another learning task.

Regularly smoking cannabis can affect teenagers so severely that they end up three years behind their classmates in terms of brain development, a landmark study has found. The results of the investigation, which involved almost 4,000 secondary school children in Canada, led researchers to conclude cannabis is more toxic for youngsters' brains than alcohol. Persistent use of the drug seriously affected basic reasoning skills – while it also had a disastrous effect on self-control, they found. Meanwhile, a separate study has found hard evidence that the main psychoactive compound in cannabis, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), causes changes in the brain that trigger schizophrenia. In the high school study, researchers at Montreal University studied pupils from the time they entered the Canadian seventh grade – aged 12 or 13 years – for four years.

Ravens and great apes may not be quite as smart as we think. Researchers have found that while they are able to plan ahead, it does not require thinking. Instead, they can make plans instinctively through prior experiences. 'Some researchers have suggested that planning in great apes and ravens develops through thinking, that they simulate future scenarios and make decisions based on such mental simulations,' said Johan Lind, associate professor in Ethology, at Centre for Cultural Evolution, Stockholm University, author of the study. 'My study shows that planning behaviours and self-control in non-human animals instead can emerge through associative learning.'

The folks who brought us the marshmallow test have some unlikely news: children today have more self-control than ever. That conclusion is based on more than 50 years of results from the iconic test, which allows a preschooler to eat one treat immediately or two if she can wait 10 minutes. The effort at delayed gratification is vastly funny but the results were found to have serious implications for children's future success. Led by psychologist Walter Mischel, who created the experiment -- one of the most famous in developmental psychology -- a research team found that children tested between 2002-2012 held out for two minutes longer on average than the original test-takers in the 1960s, and one minute longer than participants in the 1980s. A 4-year-old in the earliest group waited as long as a child between 2 ½ and 3 in the most recent tests, and 4-year-old test-takers in the 1980s waited as long as a child who was 3 ½ in the 2000s.

Many of us have already decided that things will be different in 2018. We'll eat better, get more exercise, save more money or finally get around to decluttering those closets. But by the time February rolls around, most of us – perhaps as many as 80 percent of the Americans who make New Year's resolutions – will have already given up. Why does our self-control falter, so often leaving us to revert to our old ways? The answer to this question has consequences beyond our waistlines and bank balances.

Ravens are known for being remarkably intelligent. Now a new study has revealed that these clever birds plan for the future, just like us. They can imagine future events via'mental time travel' and are capable of exercising self-control to delay gratification, researchers found. This skill of future planning was thought to be exclusive to humans and great apes. As ravens and great apes have not shared a common ancestor for more than 300 million years, these results suggest'planning' abilities evolved independently of one another.

Ravens have long been said to posses impressive intelligence and it seems they also remember people who treat them unfairly. Researchers have found that the creatures could recall trainers who gave them a raw deal by stealing their food up to a month later. The findings add to a growing understanding of the highly intelligent behaviour demonstrated by the corvid family of birds, which includes crows, ravens, magpies and others. Researchers from the University of Vienna have found that ravens (pictured) can remember being conned by human trainers up to a month after they last had contact. A group of ravens were trained to trade chunks of bread for lumps of cheese.