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Competitive foraging, decision making, and the ecological rationality of the matching law
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.
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Publication status
- Published
Publisher
MIT PressPage range
359-369Pages
10.0Book title
Proceedings of the 7th Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive BehaviorPlace of publication
Cambridge, Mass.ISBN
9780262582179Department affiliated with
- Informatics Publications
Full text available
- No
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Editors
John Hallam, Dario Floreano, Jean-Arcady Meyer, Bridget Hallam, Gillian HayesLegacy Posted Date
2012-02-06Usage metrics
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