Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Agents can rely on the patterns in the world to make their problem solving more efficient. When working with others, agents can also rely on patterns - patterns for communication and group behavior. We discuss how these patterns may be captured in schemas. W e present two types of schemas: procedural schemas which suggest a course of action for a specific situation, and contextual schemas which contain knowledge about specific kinds of problem solving. Both of these types of schemas affect an agent's ability to solve problems and communicate. Both types of schemas also guide the coordination of the groups working together to solve problems. In this paper, we focus particularly on the ways in which a schema-based approach can help agents to work together by integrating their individual problem solving with the constraints of coordinated behavior.