A key advantage of BDI-based agent programming is that agents can deliberate about which course of action to adopt to achieve a goal or respond to an event. However, while state-of-the-art BDI-based agent programming languages provide flexible support for expressing plans, they are typically limited to a single, hard-coded, deliberation strategy (perhaps with some parameterisation) for all task...

A key advantage of BDI-based agent programming is that agents can deliberate about which course of action to adopt to achieve a goal or respond to an event. However, while state-of-the-art BDI-based agent programming languages provide flexible support for expressing plans, they are typically limited to a single, hard-coded, deliberation strategy (perhaps with some parameterisation) for all task...

Building on Gollwitzer's (1990) mindset theory of action phases, it is proposed that the effects of assigned balanced deliberation on subsequent goal commitment are moderated by people's preversus postdecisional status. A balanced deliberation and impartial assessment of pros and cons is expected to reduce goal commitment in predecisional individuals, whereas a distortion of the assigned balanc...

This research examines the roles of both approach–avoidance and approach– approach conflicts in the relationship between the degree of deliberation and persistence of preference for the chosen option. In three experiments, we reverse the negative effect of deliberation on persistence reported by Nordgren and Dijksterhuis (2009). In study 1A, we conceptually replicate Nordgren and Dijksterhuis’s...

We present a reactive agent architecture which incorporates decision-theoretic notions to drive the deliberation and meta-deliberation process, and illustrate how this architecture can be exploited to model an agent who reacts to contextually instantiated norms by monitoring for norm instantiation and replanning its current intentions.

The focus of “Balancing Reactivity and Social Deliberation in Multi-agent Systems” is the right balance between the two extremes of pure reactivity and in-depth social deliberation in the context of collaborative work in multi-agent systems. This article briefly motivates this problem and provides a short guide to the contributions contained in this

BACKGROUND There is a longstanding concern about the accuracy of surrogate consent in representing the health care and research preferences of those who lose their ability to decide for themselves. We sought informed, deliberative views of the older general public (≥50 years old) regarding their willingness to participate in dementia research and to grant leeway to future surrogates to choose a...