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FB Kolloq WS25/26: Alexander Schakowski

„The psychological mechanisms underlying human social forag-ing dynamics in the wild”

Veranstaltungsdaten

Dr. Alexander Schakowski, Max-Planck-Institut Berlin 
„The psychological mechanisms underlying human social foraging dynamics in the wild”

Humans have mastered diverse foraging styles in extreme habitats from the tropics to the Arctic across a range of social settings. The unique complexity of the human foraging niche is considered a main driver of the evolution of cognition and social learning skills. Yet, the mechanisms underlying social foraging decisions (such as where to go and when to leave) in the real world remain unknown as existing field studies typically focus on individual-level behavior. Integrating high-precision GPS tracking and video footage from large-scale ice-fishing competitions in Finland with cognitive-computational modeling and agent-based simulations, we show how foragers integrate personal information (e.g., foraging success) with social information (e.g., the location of other foragers) to guide spatial search and patch-leaving decisions. We find, that foragers adaptively rely on social information to locate resources when unsuccessful and extend giving-up-times in the presence of others, resulting in increased area-restricted search at high social densities. These findings demonstrate the importance of sociality for human foraging decisions, and provide a template for harnessing high-resolution tracking data to study real-world cognition.