regret

Human regret is the emotion we feel when (typically) something goes wrong and we think of ways in which we could have acted differently. It can be a crippling emption, but it is actually a finely tuned learning mechanism that focuses our attention on the small changes in behaviour that would make a big difference in outcomes. As well as this more typical negative regret, there is also a variation, positive regret when things turned out well, but could have been even better. Regret involves complex counter-factual reasoning as well as lower emotion and stimuus–response learning.

Regret can used in AI as a success metric during machine learning: how well does the system behave compared with the best possible outcome. A computational regret model, based on human regret, can also be used both to help understand human cognition, and to enhance machine learning.