Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this study, we focused on effects of finding of emergent phenomena in rule discovery. In the experiment, weused Conway’s Game of Life, which generates high-order phenomena from fundamental rules. Our research question is torealize the effects of attention to emergent phenomena on finding the fundamental rules. The two experimental conditions(chaotic and static) differed only in initial states. In the chaotic condition, the initial state consisted some Methuselahs, whichtake long period until they become stable. On the other hand, in the static condition, the initial condition consisted manyemergent patterns: still lifes and oscillators, which repeat same pattern in short period. We classified the hypotheses reportedby the participants to either mentioning about emergent phenomena or not. This result revealed that people might see emergentphenomena not only in the static condition but also in the chaotic condition, which do not include the emergent patters.