'Exploration' of human searching strategies in an heterogeneous environment

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Introduction

Organisms move to explore their environment, to search for food and to find mates, constantly making decisions about when and where to go. The success of these routine activities depends on the searching strategies that they adopt. In the absence of any knowledge of the environment, an important question is: What statistical strategy will be the most efficient to find food? Or more specifically: Which is the distribution from where the organism should choose the duration of its forward movements? It has been suggested that a particular class of random walks, known as Lévy walks, offers optimal stochastic search strategies when faced with environmental uncertainty.

Questions

Some interesting questions to ask now are: What will be the effect of landscape structure and quality uncertainty of known targets in the individual decision making process and in the statistical strategy the organism adopts to find what is looking for? What will be the effect of adding competitors for the same targets?

To answer these questions I would like to do a field experiment with humans in the soccer field with different distributions of targets.

Participants

• Liliana Salvador
• Murad Mithani

Experiment

Description will be available soon!

Participants and volunteers for the project are needed!