Building social networks out of cognitive blocks: factors of interest in agent-based socio-cognitive simulations

This paper examines how cognitive and environmental factors influence the formation of dyadic ties. We use agent models instantiated in ACT-R that interact in a social simulation, to illustrate the effect of memory constraints on networks. We also show that environmental factors are important including population size, running time, and map configuration. To examine these relationships, we ran simulations of networks using a factorial design. Our analyses suggest three interesting conclusions: first, the tie formation of these networks approximates a logistic growth model; second, that agent memory quality (i.e., perfect or humanlike) strongly alters the network’s density and structure; third, that the three C. Zhao (&) ! R. Kaulakis ! J. W. Hiam ! F. E. Ritter The College of Information Sciences and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, USA e-mail: [email protected] R. Kaulakis e-mail: [email protected] J. W. Hiam e-mail: [email protected] F. E. Ritter e-mail: [email protected] J. H. Morgan Department of Sociology, Duke University, Durham, USA e-mail: [email protected] J. Sanford Department of Computer Science, Tufts University, Medford, USA e-mail: [email protected] G. P. Morgan School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA e-mail: [email protected] 123 Comput Math Organ Theory (2015) 21:115–149 DOI 10.1007/s10588-014-9179-0