Knowledge of resources and competitors in human foraging

Goldstone, Robert L.; Ashpole, Benjamin C.; Roberts, Michael

doi:10.3758/bf03196350

Cited by 39 publications

(47 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Two key factors are competition and social information. In general, competition increases the costs of exploration because it creates the risk that other agents might exploit the reward before you (e.g., Goldstone et al, 2005;Todd, 2007). Consequently, agents may stop their exploration and switch to exploitation sooner in the presence of competitors.…”

Section: Social Factorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Unpacking the exploration–exploitation tradeoff: A synthesis of human and animal literatures.

Mehlhorn¹,

Newell²,

Todd³

et al. 2015

Decision

334

318

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Many decisions in the lives of animals and humans require a fine balance between the exploration of different options and the exploitation of their rewards. Do you buy the advertised car, or do you testdrive different models? Do you continue feeding from the current patch of flowers, or do you fly off to another one? Do you marry your current partner, or try your luck with someone else? The balance required in these situations is commonly referred to as the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. It features prominently in a wide range of research traditions, including learning, foraging, and decisionmaking literatures. Here, we integrate findings from these and other often-isolated literatures in order to gain a better understanding of the possible tradeoffs between exploration and exploitation, and we propose new theoretical insights that might guide future research. Specifically, we explore how potential tradeoffs depend on (1) the conceptualization of exploration and exploitation; (2) the influencing environmental, social, and individual factors; (3) the scale at which exploration and exploitation are considered; (4) the relationship and types of transitions between the two behaviors; and (5) the goals of the decision maker. We conclude that exploration and exploitation are best conceptualized as points on a continuum, and that the extent to which an agent's behavior can be interpreted as exploratory or exploitative depends upon the level of abstraction at which it is considered.

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Section: Social Factorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Exploration is less costly in non-competitive environments than in competitive environments; e.g., during mate choice in fish (Lindstrom & Lehtonen, 2013) and humans (Todd, 2007;Goldstone, Ashpole, & Roberts, 2005). The presence of competitors reduces information search in the "sampling paradigm" (Phillips et al, 2014).…”

Section: Factormentioning

confidence: 99%

Unpacking the exploration–exploitation tradeoff: A synthesis of human and animal literatures.

Mehlhorn¹,

Newell²,

Todd³

et al. 2015

Decision

334

318

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…One likely difference of consequence is the dimensionality of the search problems. Mason and Watts employed a spatial search task similar to earlier collective foraging tasks (Goldstone & Ashpole, 2004;Goldstone, Ashpole, & Roberts, 2005). Although their search space was "rugged" in the sense of having many local maxima, it was only a two-dimensional 100 9 100 grid.…”

Section: Imitation and Performancementioning

confidence: 99%

Social Learning Strategies in Networked Groups

2013

Self Cite

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When making decisions, humans can observe many kinds of information about others' activities, but their effects on performance are not well understood. We investigated social learning strategies using a simple problem-solving task in which participants search a complex space, and each can view and imitate others' solutions. Results showed that participants combined multiple sources of information to guide learning, including payoffs of peers' solutions, popularity of solution elements among peers, similarity of peers' solutions to their own, and relative payoffs from individual exploration. Furthermore, performance was positively associated with imitation rates at both the individual and group levels. When peers' payoffs were hidden, popularity and similarity biases reversed, participants searched more broadly and randomly, and both quality and equity of exploration suffered. We conclude that when peers' solutions can be effectively compared, imitation does not simply permit scrounging, but it can also facilitate propagation of good solutions for further cumulative exploration.

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“…Resources are harvested by moving in this environment. Such a dynamic, spatial, and interactive environment provides us with a natural experimental platform for exploring spatial foraging strategies (Goldstone and Ashpole 2004), the influence of moment-by-moment changes in other participants' foraging patterns (Goldstone et al 2005), the temporal dynamics of harvesting decisions (Kraft and Baum 2001), and realistic rules such as property rights based on spatial boundaries.…”

Section: The Experimental Settingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effect of rule choice in dynamic interactive spatial commons

et al. 2008

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This paper uses laboratory experiments to examine the effect of an endogenous rule change from open access to private property as a potential solution to overharvesting in commons dilemmas. A novel, spatial, real-time renewable resource environment was used to investigate whether participants were willing to invest in changing the rules from an open access situation to a private property system. We found that half of the participants invested in creating private property arrangements. Groups who had experienced private property in the second round of the experiment, made different decisions in the Rachel Vilensky recruited the participants. Yajing Wang, Michael Schoon, Tun Myint, Elinor Ostrom, Pamela Jagger, and Frank van Laerhoven assisted Janssen in performing the experiments. Also, many graduate students, staff, and faculty pre-tested the experiments and we thank them for all of their help. Janssen did the data analysis with input from Takao Sasaki. We are appreciative of the excellent comments of two anonymous reviewers.

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Knowledge of resources and competitors in human foraging

Cited by 39 publications

References 17 publications

Unpacking the exploration–exploitation tradeoff: A synthesis of human and animal literatures.

Unpacking the exploration–exploitation tradeoff: A synthesis of human and animal literatures.

Social Learning Strategies in Networked Groups

Effect of rule choice in dynamic interactive spatial commons

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