Related papers: Human foraging strategies flexibly adapt to resour…
To survive in dynamic and uncertain environments, individuals must develop effective decision strategies that balance information gathering and decision commitment. Models of such strategies often prioritize either optimizing tangible…
Many studies have shown that humans are "predictably irrational": they do not act in a fully rational way, but their deviations from rational behavior are quite systematic. Our goal is to see the extent to which we can explain and justify…
Biological populations are subject to fluctuating environmental conditions. Different adaptive strategies can allow them to cope with these fluctuations: specialization to one particular environmental condition, adoption of a generalist…
We study a simple model of a foraging animal that modifies the substrate on which it moves. This substrate provides its only resource, and the forager manage it by taking a limited portion at each visited site. The resource recovers its…
Previous human foraging experiments have shown that human groups routinely undermatch environmental resources much like other animal species. In this experiment, we test whether humans also selectively rely on others as information sources…
The foraging behavior of animals is a paradigm of target search in nature. Understanding which foraging strategies are optimal and how animals learn them are central challenges in modeling animal foraging. While the question of optimality…
Imagine searching a collection of coins for quarters ($0.25$), dimes ($0.10$), nickels ($0.05$), and pennies ($0.01$)-a hybrid foraging task where observers look for multiple instances of multiple target types. In such tasks, how do target…
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…
We explore how different types and uses of memory can aid spatial navigation in changing uncertain environments. In the simple foraging task we study, every day, our agent has to find its way from its home, through barriers, to food.…
Patch foraging is one of the most heavily studied behavioral optimization challenges in biology. However, despite its importance to biological intelligence, this behavioral optimization problem is understudied in artificial intelligence…
We study the role of the adaptive movement strategy in promoting biodiversity in cyclic models described by the rock-paper-scissors game rules. We assume that individuals of one out of the species may adjust their movement to escape hostile…
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…
Living in groups brings benefits to many animals, such as a protection against predators and an improved capacity for sensing and making decisions while searching for resources in uncertain environments. A body of studies has shown how…
In this study, we couple a population dynamics model with a model for optimal foraging to study the interdependence between individual-level cost-benefits and population-scale dynamics. Specifically, we study the logistic growth model,…
Navigating through a visual maze relies on the strategic use of eye movements to select and identify the route. When navigating the maze, there are trade-offs between exploring to the environment and relying on memory. This study examined…
We investigate the matching of agents to resources in a computational ecology configured to present heterogeneous resource patches to evolving, neurally controlled agents. We repeatedly find a nearly optimal, ideal free distribution (IFD)…
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…
Human decision behaviour is quite diverse. In many games humans on average do not achieve maximal payoff and the behaviour of individual players remains inhomogeneous even after playing many rounds. For instance, in repeated prisoner…
Robots that are trained to perform a task in a fixed environment often fail when facing unexpected changes to the environment due to a lack of exploration. We propose a principled way to adapt the policy for better exploration in changing…
Essential to each other, growth and exploration are jointly observed in populations, be it alive such as animals and cells or inanimate such as goods and money. But their ability to move, crucial to cope with uncertainty and optimize…