As you know or may not kno,w I’m studying Communication & Information Sciences at the Tilburg University and I’m specialising in Human Aspects of Information Technology or in short HAIT. Next the general courses such as methodology and statistics, I’m also learning some courses that are specialised for HAIT-student. One of those courses is called Cognitive Modelling and it’s all about modelling certain types of human behaviour or the behaviour of automatic processes in nature. For this course, we were given the assignment of developing a model that simulates collaboration in which all the participants have a certain degree of mindfulness. Mindfulness is shortly described as a state of mind that causes an individual to elevates himself above his personal emotions and is fully aware of the needs and emotions of his/her surrounding individuals. So it’s like a type of awareness for one and the people around that one person and we had to simulate that awareness into a very concrete and program-like manner.

So how did we do that exactly? Well, for starters we used the program called StarLogo: a simulator for simulating behaviour and interaction of simple animals, rabbits if you’d like. We had to simply the term mindfulness to a state in which is it usable and simple enough. For a team from people who are working together to accomplish certain goals and have different tasks, we translated that part into a group of 6 bunnies, technically called agents and let them roam in the simulated environment. These agents have to survive and in order for them to do so, we did let them search for food and they have to look for that food and communicate the locations of the food to other team members. The big problem we had was that mindfulness is quite an abstract concept and therefore it’s difficult to get it translated to actual behaviour. An aspect of mindfulness proved quite helpful in this process of translation and that is the fact that emotions can cloud someone’s judgement in communication processes. In the model, we translated it as a type of disturbance of the exact location of the food that is communicated from the person who finds it. Also, if someone is not mindful, that person can be a bit egocentric and we translated that into a choice that an agent has in the model if he finds some food, whether he can use all the food for himself or be mindful and share the remaining energy the food has to the agent closest to him. These aspect are concretised by making the variables called emotions and mindfulness and by increasing those variables, the agents are less communicating.

For more aspects and the precise variables you could check out the model yourself and play with it youself a bit. It’s found at the following links

The program StarLogo (required to play the model):
http://education.mit.edu/starlogo/
The model itself:
http://www.nexxtgen.nl/mindfulness.slogo

Hope you have a bit fun the model, although it’s not entirely completed yet and stay tuned for upcoming blogs!