Decision Making in a Complex World: How Human Foragers Integrate Information from Their Environment, Personal Experience, and Conspecifics

• Applicant: Dr. Marwa Kavelaars
• Subject Area: Sensory and Behavioural Biology ; General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 548491539

Adaptive decision making is crucial for navigating our increasingly complex world and requires continuous integration of different information sources, including prior information about the environment, information from interacting with the environment, and information from others (social information). Despite many studies focusing on isolated aspects of these processes in the lab, how people dynamically integrate these information streams across various socio-ecological settings in the real world remains unknown. Here, I will close this gap by studying a prime example of continuous decision making, human foraging. I propose to use ice fishing as a novel study system to understand how humans integrate these different information streams in the real world, combining field experiments, large-scale data-collection, and computational modelling. GPS trackers and head cameras will be used to collect movement and behavioral data across socio-ecological contexts. I will examine solitary foraging to determine how prior environmental information and personal sampling experience are integrated to balance the exploration-exploitation trade-off; competitive foraging to study how social information impacts foraging decisions; and cooperative foraging to illuminate how social context (group size and incentive structure) affects individual/group foraging strategies and success. Using computational modelling, I will develop cognitive models to uncover the latent processes underlying decision making in the wild. This work will contribute to the understanding of how the socio-ecological context shapes human behavior, illuminating the benefits of social foraging and how collective behavior can emerge in societies. By uniquely combining perspectives and methods from animal ecology and psychology, the project surmounts the challenges of discerning how humans dynamically integrate information, which is vital for comprehending decision making in the real world.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position