A Cognitive Assistant for improving human reasoning skills

Cognitive Assistants support humans and enhance their capabilities in solving a wide variety of complex tasks. In this paper, we introduce a Cognitive Assistant named LIZA that is developed as a pedagogical agent and aims at improving the reasoning and decision making abilities of its users. This Cognitive Assistant is able to hold conversation with users in natural language in order to help them solve problems of common heuristics and biases. Using controlled experiments, we demonstrate that LIZA could help test persons improve their reasoning skills, and show that LIZA achieved significant higher learning gains than a non-interactive online course.