Seth, Anil K (2002) Competitive foraging, decision making, and the ecological rationality of the matching law. In: Hallam, Bridget, Floreano, Dario, Hallam, John, Hayes, Gillian and Meyer, Jean-Arcady (eds.) Proceedings of the 7th Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., pp. 359-369. ISBN 9780262582179

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Abstract

The matching law describes how individual foragers often allocate their choices, occasionally suboptimally, in experimental situations. The `ideal free distribution' predicts how groups of foraging agents should distribute themselves, optimally, over patchy environments. This paper explores the possibility that a single behavioural heuristic can account for both phenomena, allowing the potential suboptimality of matching to be understood in terms of adaptation to a group context. Two simple heuristics are compared, epsilon-sampling and omega-sampling: the latter is successful in both cases, but contrary to claims in the literature the former is successful in neither. These results emphasise the importance of multiple environmental value estimates in effective decision making.

Item Type:	Book Section
Schools and Departments:	School of Engineering and Informatics > Informatics
Depositing User:	Anil Seth
Date Deposited:	06 Feb 2012 21:18
Last Modified:	14 Jun 2012 10:01
URI:	http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/30682

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