Kairos Research has begun work on a new project funded by the Army Research Institute (ARI) entitled, “Counterfactuals as a Mechanism for Mindset Effects in Achievement” (COMMA). The project will investigate how thoughts about “what might have been,” known as counterfactual thoughts, can help or hinder individuals’ progress in learning and skill development over time.
Principal Research Scientist Dr. Amy Summerville, an expert on counterfactual thinking and the Principal Investigator of the project, noted: “The research studies in COMMA are groundbreaking because so much of the work on how counterfactuals affect learning and goal pursuit has been limited to short-term laboratory tasks. Instead, we will be collecting data about thoughts and behavior for much longer periods of weeks or months, which will allow nuanced insight into the impact of these thoughts while also reflecting the longer time scales over which real-world learning takes place in the military.”
COMMA will also develop new methods that leverage Kairos Research’s AI capabilities for detecting and quantifying narrative themes in open-ended text. “One of the hardest and slowest tasks for counterfactual researchers involves reading through text responses from participants and determining if they contain counterfactuals, and if so, how those counterfactuals are structured,” Dr. Summerville noted. “By using LLM-based tools, we’ll be able to take something that currently requires weeks and instead produce those insights within hours of completing data collection. Eventually, this could even be incorporated into tools like smart coaches that analyze learners’ text responses in real time.” Dr. Cara Widmer, a Research Scientist at Kairos Research who has led previous related projects such as the Collaborative Knowledge Curation project funded by DARPA, agreed. “COMMA brings together AI capabilities that Kairos has developed for using LLMs to quantify expert-informed coding schemes, as well as for bottom-up assessment of themes. It’s an exciting opportunity that lets us leverage these tools in an entirely different problem space, and hopefully bring new scientific insights into a major challenge for career-long learning for warfighters.”
