High-precision tracking of human foragers reveals adaptive social information use in the wild.

Foraging complexity and competitive social challenges are considered key drivers of human cognition. Yet, the decision-making mechanisms that underlie social foraging in the real world remain unknown. Integrating high-precision Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking and video footage from large-scale foraging competitions with cognitive-computational modeling and agent-based simulations, we show how foragers integrate personal, social, and ecological information to guide spatial search and patch-leaving decisions. We show how the social context emerges as a key driver of foraging dynamics. Foragers adaptively rely on social information to locate resources when unsuccessful and extend giving-up times in the presence of others, which results 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. Editor's summary: Like other animals, humans use environmental cues to determine where and how to find food. Foraging is also generally a social activity, yet the role of social information in humans' foraging decisions is poorly understood. Schakowski et al. used ice-fishing competitions in eastern Finland to observe the roles of environmental and social information in decisions about where to fish and when to move on to another spot (see the Perspective by Todd and Hills). Analyzing video footage and location data from headcams and GPS devices, respectively, the authors found that social information, specifically where other participants were fishing, influenced foraging behaviors, especially for women. Participants selected sites (and were less likely to leave them) in areas with a higher density of other individuals, which were more likely to produce fish catches. —Bianca Lopez INTRODUCTION: Successful foraging (i.e. locating and extracting resources) is critical for the survival of every organism. The complexity of the human foraging niche poses distinctive challenges that likely contributed to the evolution of memory, navigational abilities, and social learning skills. Humans have mastered diverse foraging styles in extreme habitats, from the hot tropics to the cold Arctic, ranging from tuber digging, to mushroom and berry picking, to hunting and fishing. In most of these examples, humans forage together with others. Foraging decisions (such as where to go and when to leave) are, therefore, likely influenced by social information. Previous field studies on human foraging decisions have focused on individual-level behavior and the acquisition of personal information (e.g. through sampling the environment). How such personal information is integrated with social information (e.g. obtained by observing others) has rarely been studied in natural foraging contexts. RATIONALE: In this work, we report results from multiple ice fishing competitions in Finland. Ice fishing is an important foraging tradition in the Nordic countries and is practiced competitively in the modern era. During competitions, groups of ice fishers forage on the same lake for the highest catch return, which demands physical strength (e.g. relocating long distances through deep snow), endurance in harsh weather conditions, skilled use of specialized tools, and the ability to form mental representations of the resource distribution while closely monitoring the behavior of others. Such competitions thus provide an opportunity for large-scale field experimentation to study how humans integrate personal and social information when competing for resources in a highly specialized foraging environment. We equipped large groups of ice fishers on different lakes with high-resolution Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking devices and headcams to study how they decide where to go and how long to stay at a foraging location before moving to a new spot. We collected data of 477 foraging trips, made by 74 individuals, and a total of more than 16,000 individual decisions. RESULTS: Using computational modeling, we find that the social context is an important source of information for deciding where to go: Ice fishers go to areas where other individuals are fishing. This social information is integrated with their own catching success: When ice fishers catch fish, they move to nearby areas, but they move further away when not catching any fish. Social information was less important for the decision when to leave a spot compared with personal information on catching success. This suggests adaptive, context-dependent mechanisms of social and personal information integration that are systematically linked to the requirements of each task. CONCLUSION: Social foraging decisions are typically studied in artificial laboratory settings, which provides detailed insight into the social learning strategies that are at play. How such findings translate to natural contexts is unknown. This study aims to close this gap by providing insights into the mechanisms that guide social information integration in a real-world setting. Tracking competitive ice fishers to study social information use during foraging.: During the competitions, ice fishers must constantly make two key decisions: where to go (i.e. spot selection) and when to leave (i.e. spot leaving). Using high-resolution GPS tracking [shown are all movement tracks during 1 day, highlighting the trajectory (black line) and spot visits (green circles) of one participant] and video recordings reveals that social information and personal information are important for both decisions, but to varying degrees. [Copyright for images in the top left: Petri Niemelä] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]