9311496 Hutchins This is the first year funding of a three-year continuing award. Culture is a process that makes available to humans resources for the organization of behavior. This organization is accomplished via both learned internal cognitive structures and created social and material structures in the environment. Until recently, the cognitive sciences have not had very good conceptual tools for describing the interaction of individual behavior and culturalprocess. The P.I. is engaged in a project which uses computer simulations to complement theories of culture and cognition via modelling the properties of groups of interacting learning agents. By taking the group as a unit of analysis-both here and in the real-world study of cognition-the investigator has made important progress toward a theory which reunites social and material mediators of individual behavior with traditional individual cognitive properties. The P.I. proposes establishing a dedicated research project centered on simulations of cultural process for the purpose of elaborating this theory.
