Cognitive Aspects of Decision Making

What are we in the Modeling & Simulation (M&S;)community to do with the volumes of ‘human terrain’ datanow being published by the military and others indatabases of the demographics and needs/values/norms ofpopulations of interest? This paper suggests that the M&S;community would be remiss if it did not rise to thischallenge and suggest next steps for the use of this humanterrain data resource. These datasets are a key asset forthose interested in synthesis of two major agent-basedmodeling paradigms – the cognitive and the social – as thispaper argues. We pursue this argument with a case studyintegrating a cognitive agent environment (PMFserv) and asocial agent environment (FactionSim) and applying themto various regions of interest (MidEast, SE Asia, Africa) toassess their validity and realism.