Robert Axelrod's model of the spread of culture is extended to demonstrate that social interaction can function as an algorithm for optimizing cognition. Mental structures can be represented as strings of symbols that can be evaluated according to some criterion of goodness. Individuals 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 individual structures.
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James Kennedy (1998) studied this question.
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