Title: Cognitive Maps
Description: Cognitive maps have emerged as an important tool in modeling and decision making. In a nutshell they are signed di-graphs that capture the cause/effect relationships that subject matter experts believe exist in a problem space under consideration. Each node in the map represents some variable concept. These generally fall into one of several “hard” categories: physical attributes of the environment, characteristics of artifacts embedded in the problem space, or one of several “soft” areas: decisions being made, social, psychological or cultural characteristics of the decision makers, intentions, etc. Part of the value of cognitive maps is that these hard and soft concepts can be seamlessly mixed in them to build a more robust model of the problem.
Edges in the map connect nodes for which a causal relationship is believed to exist. The edge is directed from the causal node to the effect node. In a general cognitive map, the edges have integer strengths of 1, indicating direct causality, -1, indicating inverse causality, and 0, indicating no causal link. A special type of cognitive maps, a fuzzy cognitive map, allows fuzziness in the modeling of the edge strengths. Unlike nodes that have crisp values, edge strengths can have any fractional value on the interval [-1,1], with fractional values indicating partial causality. Thus, relationships such as A somewhat affects B, or A really causes B can be captured and incorporated in the map. The ability to model partial causality in the map gives this technique great value in problem spaces that have complex interactions between the physical environment, man-made machines and decisions by human operators.
The map is a true model in the sense that it has predictive capabilities. In a typical situation, a set of nodes with known values are designated inputs. These values are applied to the map and held constant at their known values. In much the same way that voltage or current sources are sources of energy in an electrical circuit, these input nodes represent sources of causality in the map. These input values are then propagated through the map, using a user defined thresholding function at each node to map its inputs to one of the permissible nodal values. The process is repeated multiple times for all nodes in the map until one of two meta-situations develops. Either the map will reach equilibrium in the sense that the nodal values remain constant, or it will reach a limit cycle, an oscillatory condition where a group of nodes change back and forth between two more sets of values.
Subjects: environment, information, engineering