Toward a Hybrid Cultural Cognitive Architecture

Human Behavior Models tend to " mirror " their American developers, not taking into account (among other things) the particular background/motivations of the person or groups we're modeling One big behavioral motivator in humans is culture • surface features (dress, architecture, language) • cognitive features (norms, values) • interactional features (organizational behavior, language use) Overall Goal: a " Cultural Cognitive Agent Architecture " used to build HBMs that exhibit behavior consistent with cultural influences (and what would Soar have to say about it?) • From a cognitive anthropology perspective: culture has rich knowledge-based representations within an individual's cognition, • Affects cognition in various ways: • perception – what is this situation I'm in? • appraisal/emotion – how should I feel in this situation? • expectation – what should happen next? • action selection – what should I do in this situation? • Culture is epiphenomenal – falls out of cognition, schema theory Multitudes of cultural " stories " acquired over time that describe, for example, • everyday activities (going to a restaurant, personal interactions) • objects and their importance (monuments, sacred objects) • organizational structure (religious leader hierarchy) • Serve as organized representations of knowledge about events, things, relationships, etc. (there are many kinds of schema) • Serve as processors of information, recognizing events or objects in the environment, and assigning meaning to those events or objects • Can be composed hierarchically – that is, the output interpretation of one schema is passed to another schema as input • Are learned through experience Cultural Schema • learned as part of the enculturation process deliberately (taught) or as a matter of experience • Patterns for recognition, understanding within cultural context • Patterns for appropriate/expected behavior (" norms ")