Adaptive mechanisms of social and asocial learning in immersive collective foraging.

ABSTRACT: Human cognition is distinguished by our ability to adapt to different environments and circumstances. Yet the mechanisms driving adaptive behavior have predominantly been studied in separate asocial and social contexts, with an integrated framework remaining elusive. Here, we use a collective foraging task in a virtual Minecraft environment to integrate these two fields, by leveraging automated transcriptions of visual field data combined with high-resolution spatial trajectories. Our behavioral analyses capture both the structure and temporal dynamics of social interactions, which are then directly tested using computational models sequentially predicting each foraging decision. These results reveal that adaptation mechanisms of both asocial foraging and selective social learning are driv

SUBMITTER: Wu CM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12032219 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature