Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Biological systems are capable of acting in a shared environment to produce emergent, self-organized behavior that is the result of the constraints imposed by local interactions– such as bird flocking or ant swarming behavior. These examples present minimal demands for a shared-intention between co-actors, whereas other instances necessitate the formation of a shared goal. In these goal-directed tasks, how much of the observed complexity can be explained by the constraints imposed by both the environment and adherence to the shared task goal? This paper begins to investigate this question by presenting results from a two-person cooperative “shepherding” task first developed in Nalepka et al. (2017) but with fewer constraints. Results provide further evidence that the emergent behavior is the result of the constraints imposed by the task. The included task-dynamic model suggests a general model that can be used to understand multiagent herding behavior in a variety of contexts.