Piaget? Vygotsky? I'm Game! 1 Running Head: Agent-based Modeling for Psychology Piaget? Vygotsky? I'm Game!: Agent-based Modeling for Psychology Research What Is an Agent-based Model?

We are currently in the process of revising this conference paper toward submission to a journal. Please contact the authors with any questions with regards to the current draft. Abstract We discuss agent-based models as research tools for developmental and social psychology. " Agents " are computer-based entities, e.g., individual people or animals. To construct an agent-based model, the modeler assigns the agents real-world roles and rules, and then studies the model through conducting simulation experiments in which the agents follow their rules, and observes real-time data. Agent-based models are dynamic, expressive, and afford immediate feedback. Agent-based models are particularly useful for understanding complex phenomena, e.g., the dynamics of multiple individual learners interacting with their peers and with artifacts in their environment and the emergent group patterns arising over time from these multiple interactions. We describe an agent-based simulation that we designed as a " thought experiment " to shed light on the ongoing debate between two theories of learning, constructivism and social constructivism. When " running " the models, unexpected consequences arise, and this leads to successive refinement of theory. Practicing ABM in psychology research can potentially support the development of richer theoretical models that coordinate complementary perspectives as viable complements of an integrated explanatory structure. 3 Piaget? Vygotsky? I'm Game!: Agent-Based Modeling for Psychology Research " [T]he social fact is for us a fact to be explained, not to be invoked as an extra-psychological factor. " Piaget (1962/1951, p. 4) " The development of thought is to Piaget, a story of the gradual socialization of deeply intimate, personal, autistic mental states. Even social speech is represented as following, not preceding, egocentric speech. " Vygotsky (1962/1934, p. 18) In this paper, we present a new methodology for conducting research on psychology theory, agent-based modeling. Agent-based modeling (hence ABM) has been increasingly used by natural scientists to study a wide range of phenomena such as the interactions of species in an ecosystem, the interactions of molecules in a chemical reaction, the percolation of oil through a substrate, and the food What all these studies have in common that make them particularly conducive to ABM treatment is that the focal phenomenon in question can be construed as a pattern resulting from the cumulative activity of many elements. For example, the phenomenon of pressure, e.g., in a gas chamber, is explained as the cumulative collisions of myriad particles with the walls of …