Foraging as Visual Navigation - Individual vs. Social Information
Date:
One of 5 invited student talks at a summer school. Mostly conceptual-minded + initial results.
Abstract:
Individual foraging strategy, comprising spatial navigation, memory, and decision-making, can be seen as a local solution to a common problem: acquiring patchily distributed resources in a dynamic environment. In an animal group, this computation increases in complexity, requiring an individual to sense both spatial as well as social factors. How the involved representation develops to balance these two sensory inputs has received little attention. I seek to demonstrate, through simulating and evolving agents equipped with visual, memory, and decision-making neural network modules, that fundamental dynamical manifolds emerge in order to coordinate environmental and social features with local food distribution, however with increasingly signiScant attention to the latter in social groups as individuals can leverage collective computation to forage more effectively.