Related papers: Foraging as an evidence accumulation process
Animal groups collaborate with one another throughout their lives to better comprehend their surroundings. Here, we try to model, using continuous random walks, how the entire process of birth, reproduction, and death might impact the…
The drift diffusion model (DDM) is a model of sequential sampling with diffusion (Brownian) signals, where the decision maker accumulates evidence until the process hits a stopping boundary, and then stops and chooses the alternative that…
We investigate a general class of models for swarming/self-collective behaviour in domains with boundaries. The model is expressed as a stochastic system of interacting particles subject to both reflecting boundary condition and common…
1. Spatial memory plays a role in the way animals perceive their environments, resulting in memory-informed movement patterns that are observable to ecologists. Developing mathematical techniques to understand how animals use memory in…
In a constantly changing world, animals must account for environmental volatility when making decisions. To appropriately discount older, irrelevant information, they need to learn the rate at which the environment changes. We develop an…
Highly evolved animals continuously update their knowledge of social factors, refining movement decisions based on both historical and real-time observations. Despite its significance, research on the underlying mechanisms remains limited.…
Human memory retrieval often resembles ecological foraging where animals search for food in a patchy environment. Optimal foraging means following the Marginal Value Theorem (MVT), in which individuals exploit a patch of semantically…
Ants are social insects. When the existing nest of an ant colony becomes uninhabitable, the hunt for a new suitable location for migration of the colony begins. Normally, multiple sites may be available as the potential new nest site.…
Category fluency is a widely studied cognitive phenomenon, yet two conflicting accounts have been proposed as the underlying retrieval mechanism -- an optimal foraging process deliberately searching through memory (Hills et al., 2012) and a…
Information foraging connects optimal foraging theory in ecology with how humans search for information. The theory suggests that, following an information scent, the information seeker must optimize the tradeoff between exploration by…
Bird migration is an adaptive behavior ultimately aiming at optimizing survival and reproductive success. We propose an optimal switching model to study bird migration, where birds' migration behaviors can be efficiently modeled as…
Theory purports that animal foraging choices evolve to maximize returns, such as net energy intake. Empirical research in both human and nonhuman animals reveals that individuals often attend to the foraging choices of their competitors…
Foraging and acquiring of food is a delicate balance between managing the costs, both energy and social, and individual preferences. Previous research on the solitary foraging of free ranging dogs showed that they prioritized the…
We study a simple model of a forager as a walk that modifies a relaxing substrate. Within it simplicity, this provides an insight on a number of relevant and non-intuitive facts. Even without memory of the good places to feed and no…
Foraging site constancy, or repeated return to the same foraging location, is a foraging strategy used by many species to decrease uncertainty, but it is often unclear exactly how the foraging site is identified. Here we focus on the…
Many foraging animals find food using composite random search strategies, which consist of intensive and extensive search modes. Models of composite search can generate predictions about how optimal foragers should behave in each search…
Animals foraging alone are hypothesized to optimize the encounter rates with resources through L\'evy walks. However, the issue of how the interactions between multiple foragers influence their search efficiency is still not completely…
We analyze the movement of a starving forager on a one-dimensional periodic lattice, where each location contains one unit of food. As the forager lands on sites with food, it consumes the food, leaving the sites empty. If the forager lands…
A prey animal surveying its environment must decide whether there is a dangerous predator present or not. If there is, it may flee. Flight has an associated cost, so the animal should not flee if there is no danger. However, the prey animal…
Information theory has explained the organization of many biological phenomena, from the physiology of sensory receptive fields to the variability of certain DNA sequence ensembles. Some scholars have proposed that information should…