This Research Opportunities for Women - Planning Grant is intended to assist the Principal Investigator in undertaking research on building and testing a theory of the relationship between cognitive processes and social processes that comprise U. S. foreign policy decision making. The planning grant will allow her to learn computer languages for modeling decision making and to develop a prototype computational model for assessing different organizational scenarios and cognitive contraints in the U. S. foreign policy domain. The research support will also allow the investigator to develop a more systematic, computerized information retrieval system for representing the knowledge of cognitive and social processes available in foreign policy documents. Finally, the support will allow the investigator to assess additional resources (software, data, programming skills) that might be used in studying foreign policy decision making.