Social Cognitive Maps

Social Cognitive Maps, Swarm Perception and Distributed Search on
Dynamic Landscapes, CVRM-IST 127E-2005 technical report, final draft
submitted to Brains, Minds & Media, Journal of New Media in Neural and
Cognitive Science, NRW, Germany, 2005.

http://alfa.ist.utl.pt/~cvrm/staff/vramos/Vramos-BMM.pdf

ABSTRACT: Swarm Intelligence (SI) is the property of a systems whereby
the collective behaviors of (unsophisticated) entities interacting
locally with their environment cause coherent functional global
patterns to emerge. SI provides a basis with which it is possible to
explore collective (or distributed) problem solving without centralized
control or the provision of a global model. To tackle the formation of
a coherent social collective intelligence from individual behaviors, we
discuss several concepts related to self-organization, stigmergy and
social foraging in animals. Then, in a more abstract level we suggest
and stress the role played not only by the environmental media as a
driving force for societal learning, as well as by positive and
negative feedbacks produced by the many interactions among agents.
Finally, presenting a simple model based on the above features, we will
address the collective adaptation of a social community to a cultural
(environmental, contextual) or media informational dynamical landscape,
represented here - for the purpose of different experiments - by
several three-dimensional mathematical functions that suddenly change
over time. Results indicate that the collective intelligence is able to
cope and quickly adapt to unforeseen situations even when over the same
cooperative foraging period, the community is requested to deal with
two different and contradictory purposes.

KEYWORDS: Swarm Intelligence and Perception, Social Cognitive Maps,
Social Foraging, Self-Organization, Distributed Search and
Optimization.

hope u could enjoy it. best, v.

~ v. ramos [http://alfa.ist.utl.pt/~cvrm/staff/vramos/]