Looking Forward and Looking Backward : Cognitive and Experiential

Research support from the Sol Snider Center for Entrepreneurship at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and the Division of Research, Harvard Business School is gratefully acknowledged. We have benefited from the comments of seminar participants at the Dallas ORSA/TIMS Meeting; Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago; Sloan School of Management, MIT; Anderson School of Management, UCLA; the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; University of Wisconsin, and Columbia University. We thank John Lafkas and Sid Winter for their comments on the prior draft and the Associate Editor Rod Kramer and two anonymous reviewers who played an important role in the development of the paper by constructively prodding us to clarify our arguments. Finally, we thank Linda Johanson for her thoughtful editorial help. We used computer simulations to examine the role and interrelationship between search processes that are forward-looking, based on actors' cognitive map of actionoutcome linkages, and those that are backward-looking, or experience based. Cognition was modeled as a simple, low-dimensional representation of a more complex, higher dimensional fitness landscape. Results show that, although crude, these representations still act as a powerful guide to initial search efforts and usefully constrain the direction of subsequent experiential search. Changing a cognitive representation itself can act as an important mode of adaptation, effectively resulting in the sequential allocation of attention to different facets of the environment. This virtue of shifting cognitive representation, however, may be offset by the loss of tacit knowledge associated with the prior cognitional