THINKING IS SOCIAL - EXPERIMENTS WITH THE ADAPTIVE CULTURE MODEL

Robert Axelrod's model of the spread of culture is extended to demonst rate that social interaction can function as an algorithm for optimizi ng cognition. Mental structures can be represented as strings of symbo ls that can be evaluated according to some criterion of goodness. Indi viduals interact with their neighbors, often resulting in patterns of similarities within and differences between regions of the population. Group-level phenomena, in turn, result in the optimization of individ ual structures.