A cognitively based simulation of academic science

The models used in social simulation to date have mostly been very simplistic cognitively, with little attention paid to the details of individual cognition. This work proposes a more cognitively realistic approach to social simulation. It begins with a model created by Gilbert (1997) for capturing the growth of academic science. Gilbert’s model, which was equation-based, is replaced here by an agent-based model, with the cognitive architecture CLARION providing greater cognitive realism. Using this cognitive agent model, results comparable to previous simulations and to human data are obtained. It is found that while different cognitive settings may affect the aggregate number of scientific articles produced, they do not generally lead to different distributions of number of articles per author. The paper concludes with a discussion of the correspondence between our model and the constructivist view of academic science. It is argued that using more cognitively realistic models in simulations may lead to novel insights.