Decision Making in a Complex World: How Human Foragers Integrate Information from Their Environment, Personal Experience, and Conspecifics

Adaptive decision making is key for navigating our increasingly complex world and requires continuous integration of different sources of information, including prior information about the environment, updated information resulting from interactions with the environment, and information from others (“social information”). Despite a rich understanding of isolated aspects of these processes in the lab, how people dynamically and continuously integrate these information streams across various socio-ecological settings in the real world, and the subsequent downstream consequences on the outcome, are largely unknown. In this project, I will close this gap by studying a prime example of continuous decision making, human foraging in the wild, across various socio-ecological settings. I will uniquely track ice fishers—alone and in various social settings—across different ecologies, while also experimentally varying access to prior information. Foragers will be equipped with high-resolution GPS trackers to record spatial behaviour and head cameras to quantify information sampling and social information use. Finally, I will employ state-of-the-art computational cognitive modelling to uncover how the integration of prior, sampling and social information drives decision making across socio-ecological settings.