Marshall Abrams's Population Coherence: Cultural transmission with analogy-influenced biases, using Holyoak and Thagard's (1989) ACME model of analogy recognition. This is a rewrite of popco in Clojure, using different data structures, algorithms, etc., but with the same functionality except for some peripheral details.
popco2 is a framework for agent-based simulations1 in which agents' communication of their simulated beliefs depends how those beliefs do, or do not, fit into analogies. It involves "coherence" in two senses: (a) it often tends to generate agreement between agents, and (b) the ACME model of analogy processing can be viewed as based on ideas about coherence (see references below). For the motivation of this project, an illustration of its use, and the primary documentation of how the software works, see the open access article described below.
This software is copyright 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 by Marshall Abrams, and is distributed under the Gnu General Public License version 3.0 as specified in the file LICENSE, except where noted. (For example, there is source code in src/java that was written by other authors, which is released under different licenses.)
Please feel free to contact me with questions, suggestions, interest in help developing popco simulations, etc. at:
mabrams ([at]) uab [(dot)] edu
marshall ([at]) logical [(dot)] net In some documents here I refer to the original popco as "popco1". I often refer to the current version as "popco" rather than "popco2" when context makes the intended sense clear. This repository was previously called "popco-x".
Agent-based models are typically "simple-agent" models, in which agents behave according to simple rules, or "complex-agent" models which incorporate complex models of cognitive processes. I argue that there is also an important role for agent-based computer models in which agents incorporate cognitive models of moderate complexity. In particular, I argue that such models have the potential to bring insights from the humanistic study of culture into population-level modeling of cultural change.
I motivate my proposal in part by describing an agent-based modeling framework, POPCO, in which agents' communication of their simulated beliefs depends on a model of analogy processing implemented by artificial neural networks within each agent. I use POPCO to model a hypothesis about causal relations between cultural patterns proposed by Peggy Sanday.
In model 1, empirical patterns like those reported by Sanday emerge from the influence of analogies on agents' communication with each other. Model 2 extends model 1 by allowing the components of a new analogy to diffuse through the population for reasons unrelated to later effects of the analogy. This illustrates a process by which novel cultural features might arise.
The inclusion of relatively simple cognitive models in agents allows modeling population-level effects of inferential and cultural coherence relations, including symbolic cultural relationships. I argue that such models of moderate complexity can illuminate various causal relationships involving cultural patterns and cognitive processes.
Keywords: Simulation; Culture; Cognition; Analogy; Metaphor; Hermeneutics
Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard (1989), "Analogical mapping by constraint satisfaction". Cognitive Science 13:295–355.
Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard (1995), Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Paul Thagard (2000), Coherence in Thought and Action. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
For additional relevant sources, see the article in Complex Adaptive Systems Modeling that's described above.
1 "Agent-based" here refers to the loose class of simulations in which outcomes of interest come from interactions between many semi-independent entities--agents--which often model behaviors or interactions between people, organisms, companies, etc. "Agent-based" does not refer to various ways of dealing with concurrency, as for example with Clojure's agent data structure.