This paper has presented a computational cognitive model and a theory of conventional behavior in everyday activity.
The computational model details the emergence of convention in circumstances where there is no ruling body of knowledge developed by prior generations of actors within the community to guide behavior. The example domain is a group of actors who are part of a moving company. Their job is to move boxes and furniture from a house into a truck. With practice, individuals within the community begin to converge on a set of conventionalized behaviors that match the regularly occurring problems of coordination in the domain of activity. One feature of the model is that the mechanisms for improving behavior are tied to the memory function of individual actors. Another important feature of the model is that the community improves its performance despite the fact that individuals reason independently about their experiences. A large set of computational experiments were conducted. The empirical evidence supports the theoretical position that was developed on conventional behavior.
Conventions develop with the practice of a community of actors. Convention is measured as the reduction in the amount of work needed by participants in a joint activity to achieve common goals. The development of convention reduces communication, planning costs, and the number of primitive actions needed to achieve common goals. There is no unique internal structure in the mind of all participants that represents a conventional behavior; there may be an external one. A convention is a predisposition for participants to expect certain points of coordination to develop during the course of their activity. The expected points of coordination form a design for activity; they evolve over time to match changes in circumstances; they are not a complete specification of the action. Because of uncertainty, interruptions, and numerous other opportunities to get off-track and out-of-synch, the participants must work jointly and continuously to achieve conventional coordination. Reasoning about convention is informed by the constraints, affordances, and opportunities available as the joint behavior unfolds. The potential of the designs available within the community of actors is realized and emerges only during the activity. Conventional behavior in everyday activity entails a model of cognition as pragmatic action. Participants in the joint activity work together, helping one another to realize a design for the activity; reasoning out the conventional behavior is not the act of a solitary individual. Conventions develop within the home task environment: individual actors become more familiar with the behaviors of their co-participants and their expectations and predispositions towards regularly occurring joint activity begin to converge.