Across societies, cultures, and geographic regions, reoccurring patterns of generalizable human behavior emerge, and within a given sociocultural context, recognizable and reasonably stable patterns of life can be observed, enabling the mental creation of a "baseline" of normal activity. To operate effectively in complex urban contexts, military personnel must be able to recognize local baselines and to use their knowledge of both local and archetypal patterns of life to intuitively identify and respond to anomalies in those baselines.

Enabling personnel to develop these nuanced sociocultural perceptual skills presents several science-and-technology challenges. For instance, available training products may effectively train region-specific competencies or even general cultural awareness, but these programs rarely emphasize archetypal patterns or strategies for identifying anomalies in operational settings. Also, additional work must be conducted to construct appropriate constructive simulations in which to practice these skills; that is, the community must define more computationally grounded principles for integrated, realistic behaviors.

In this paper, we will provide a synthesized overview of the research that informs theories on "Patterns of Life. We also offer a construct definition for the phrase and outline initial thoughts about its training. Then we describe the behavior-representation and behavior-generation gaps that must be resolved before patterns-of-life training simulations can fully address the training need. Finally, we outline our current effort to leverage the integrated academic findings, research-based military training strategies, and next-generation behavioral models to develop a government-owned immersive simulator for training Marines to recognize patterns of life and learn baselining skills.