Individual exploration and selective social learning: Balancing exploration-exploitation trade-offs in collective foraging

Garg, Ketika; Kello, Christopher T.; Smaldino, Paul E.

doi:10.1101/2021.11.10.468137

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 114 publications

(111 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Social central place foragers often forage in the presence of others and can learn from them. For example, social information can deter risky exploration while encouraging exploitation [1,7,8].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Consistent long-distance foraging flights across years and seasons at colony level in a Neotropical bat

Calderón-Capote,

van Toor,

O’Mara

et al. 2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

All foraging animals face a trade-off: how much time should they invest in exploitation of known resources versus exploration to discover new resources? For group-living central place foragers, balancing these competing goals poses particular challenges. The availability of social information may discourage individuals from investing in risky, expensive but possibly rewarding exploration. We GPS-tracked groups of greater spear-nosed bats (Phyllostomus hastatus) from three colonies on Isla Colon in Panama. In the dry season, when these omnivores forage on the nectar of ephemeral balsa flowers (Ochroma pyramidale), bats consistently travelled long distances to remote, colony-specific foraging areas, bypassing flowering trees closer to their roosts. They continued to use these same areas in the wet season, when feeding on a diverse, presumably ubiquitously distributed diet, but also visited other, similarly distant foraging areas. Foraging areas were shared within, but not always between colonies. Our longitudinal dataset suggests that bats from each colony invest in long-distance commutes to socially learned shared foraging areas, bypassing other available food patches. Rather than investing in exploration to find nearby resources or engaging in a win-stay lost-shift foraging strategy, these bats follow colony specific behaviours consistent with the existence of culturally transmitted preferences for specific feeding grounds.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Consistent long-distance foraging flights across years and seasons at colony level in a Neotropical bat

Calderón-Capote,

van Toor,

O’Mara

et al. 2024

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Individual exploration and selective social learning: Balancing exploration-exploitation trade-offs in collective foraging

Garg

Kello

Smaldino

2021

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Search requires balancing exploring for more options and exploiting the ones previously found. Individuals foraging in a group face another trade-off: whether to engage in social learning to exploit the solutions found by others or to solitarily search for unexplored solutions. Social learning can decrease the costs of finding new resources, but excessive social learning can decrease the exploration for new solutions. We study how these two trade-offs interact to influence search efficiency in a model of collective foraging under conditions of varying resource abundance, resource density, and group size. We modeled individual search strategies as Lévy walks, where a power-law exponent (μ) controlled the trade-off between exploitative and explorative movements in individual search. We modulated the trade-off between individual search and social learning using a selectivity parameter that determined how agents responded to social cues in terms of distance and likely opportunity costs. Our results show that social learning is favored in rich and clustered environments, but also that the benefits of exploiting social information are maximized by engaging in high levels of individual exploration. We show that selective use of social information can modulate the disadvantages of excessive social learning, especially in larger groups and with limited individual exploration. Finally, we found that the optimal combination of individual exploration and social learning gave rise to trajectories with μ ≈ 2 and provide support for the general optimality such patterns in search. Our work sheds light on the interplay between individual search and social learning, and has broader implications for collective search and problem-solving.

show abstract

Visual-spatial dynamics drive adaptive social learning in immersive environments

Deffner

Kahl

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Humans are uniquely capable social learners. Our capacity to learn from others across short and long timescales is a driving force behind the success of our species. Yet there are seemingly maladaptive patterns of human social learning, characterized by both overreliance and underreliance on social information. Recent advances in animal research have incorporated rich visual and spatial dynamics to study social learning in ecological contexts, showing how simple mechanisms can give rise to intelligent group dynamics. However, similar techniques have yet to be translated into human research, which additionally requires integrating the sophistication of human individual and social learning mechanisms. Thus, it is still largely unknown how humans dynamically adapt social learning strategies to different environments and how group dynamics emerge under realistic conditions. Here, we use a collective foraging experiment in an immersive Minecraft environment to provide unique insights into how visual-spatial interactions give rise to adaptive, specialized, and selective social learning. Our analyses show how groups adapt to the demands of the environment through specialization rather than homogeneity and through the adaptive deployment of selective imitation rather than indiscriminate copying. We test these mechanisms using computational modeling, providing a deeper understanding of the cognitive mechanisms that dynamically influence social decision-making in ecological contexts. Specialization of learning strategies and selective attention thus offer insights into the adaptive foundations of human social learning.

show abstract

Individual exploration and selective social learning: Balancing exploration-exploitation trade-offs in collective foraging

Cited by 3 publications

References 114 publications

Consistent long-distance foraging flights across years and seasons at colony level in a Neotropical bat

Consistent long-distance foraging flights across years and seasons at colony level in a Neotropical bat

Individual exploration and selective social learning: Balancing exploration-exploitation trade-offs in collective foraging

Visual-spatial dynamics drive adaptive social learning in immersive environments

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About