A Game of Hide and Seek: Expectations of Clumpy Resources Influence Hiding and Searching Patterns

Priming exploration across domains: does search in a spatial environment influence search in a cognitive environment?

Is there a general tendency to explore that connects search behaviour across different domains? Although the experimental evidence collected so far suggests an affirmative answer, this fundamental question about human behaviour remains open. A feasible way to test the domain-generality hypothesis is that of testing the so-called priming hypothesis: priming explorative behaviour in one domain should subsequently influence explorative behaviour in another domain. However, only a limited number of studies have experimentally tested this priming hypothesis, and the evidence is mixed. We tested the priming hypothesis in a registered report. We manipulated explorative behaviour in a spatial search task by randomly allocating people to search environments with resources that were either clustered together or dispersedly distributed. We hypothesized that, in a subsequent anagram task, participants who searched in clustered spatial environments would search for words in a more clustered way than participants who searched in the dispersed spatial environments. The pre-registered hypothesis was not supported. An equivalence test showed that the difference between conditions was smaller than the smallest effect size of interest (d = 0.36). Out of several exploratory analyses, we found only one inferential result in favour of priming. We discuss implications of these findings for the theory and propose future tests of the hypothesis.

Spatially and temporally distributed data foraging decisions in disciplinary field science

How do scientists generate and weight candidate queries for hypothesis testing, and how does learning from observations or experimental data impact query selection? Field sciences offer a compelling context to ask these questions because query selection and adaptation involves consideration of the spatiotemporal arrangement of data, and therefore closely parallels classic search and foraging behavior. Here we conduct a novel simulated data foraging study-and a complementary real-world case study-to determine how spatiotemporal data collection decisions are made in field sciences, and how search is adapted in response to in-situ data. Expert geoscientists evaluated a hypothesis by collecting environmental data using a mobile robot. At any point, participants were able to stop the robot and change their search strategy or make a conclusion about the hypothesis. We identified spatiotemporal reasoning heuristics, to which scientists strongly anchored, displaying limited adaptation to new data. We analyzed two key decision factors: variable-space coverage, and fitting error to the hypothesis. We found that, despite varied search strategies, the majority of scientists made a conclusion as the fitting error converged. Scientists who made premature conclusions, due to insufficient variable-space coverage or before the fitting error stabilized, were more prone to incorrect conclusions. We found that novice undergraduates used the same heuristics as expert geoscientists in a simplified version of the scenario. We believe the findings from this study could be used to improve field science training in data foraging, and aid in the development of technologies to support data collection decisions.

Foraging in Mind

People and other animals can search for information inside their heads. Where does this ability come from, and what does it enable cognitive systems to do? In this article, we address the behavioral and cognitive similarities between search in external environments and internal environments (e.g., memory). These require both maplike representations and the means to navigate them, and the latter involves modulation between exploitation and exploration analogous to a foraging process called area-restricted search. These findings have implications for understanding a number of cognitive abilities commonly considered to be hallmarks of the human species, such as well-developed executive control and goal-directed cognition, autonoetic consciousness (i.e., self-awareness), deliberation, and free will. Moreover, this research extends our conception of what organisms may share these abilities and how they evolved.

Search and concealment strategies in the spatiotemporal domain

Although visual search studies have primarily focused on search behavior, concealment behavior is also important in the real world. However, previous studies in this regard are limited in that their findings about search and concealment strategies are restricted to the spatial (two-dimensional) domain. Thus, this study evaluated strategies during three-dimensional and temporal (i.e., spatiotemporal) search and concealment to determine whether participants would indicate where they would hide or find a target in a temporal sequence of items. The items were stacked in an upward (Experiments 1-3) or downward (Experiment 4) direction and three factors were manipulated: scenario (hide vs. seek), partner type (friend vs. foe), and oddball (unique item in the sequence; present vs. absent). Participants in both the hide and seek scenarios frequently selected the oddball for friends but not foes, which suggests that they applied common strategies because the oddball automatically attracts attention and can be readily discovered by friends. Additionally, a principle unique to the spatiotemporal domain was revealed, i.e., when the oddball was absent, participants in both scenarios frequently selected the topmost item of the stacked layer for friends, regardless of temporal order, whereas they selected the first item in the sequence for foes, regardless of the stacked direction. These principles were not affected by visual masking or number of items in the sequence. Taken together, these results suggest that finding and hiding positions in the spatiotemporal domain rely on the presence of salient items and physical accessibility or temporal remoteness, according to partner type.

Human Foragers: Searchers by Nature and Experience

Diverse studies of human foraging have revealed behavioral strategies that may have evolved as adaptations for foraging. Here, we used an outdoor experimental search task to explore the effect of three sources of information on participants' performance: (i) information obtained directly from performing a search, (ii) information obtained prior to testing in the form of a distilled snippet of knowledge intended to experimentally simulate information acquired culturally about the environment, and (iii) information obtained from experience of foraging for natural resources for economic gain. We found that (i) immediate searching experience improved performance from the beginning to the end of the short, 2-min task, (ii) information priming improved performance notably from the very beginning of the task, and (iii) natural resource foraging experience improved performance to a lesser extent. Our results highlight the role of culturally transmitted information as well as the presence of mechanisms to rapidly integrate and implement new information into searching choices, which ultimately influence performance in a foraging task.

Generalization guides human exploration in vast decision spaces

From foraging for food to learning complex games, many aspects of human behaviour can be framed as a search problem with a vast space of possible actions. Under finite search horizons, optimal solutions are generally unobtainable. Yet, how do humans navigate vast problem spaces, which require intelligent exploration of unobserved actions? Using various bandit tasks with up to 121 arms, we study how humans search for rewards under limited search horizons, in which the spatial correlation of rewards (in both generated and natural environments) provides traction for generalization. Across various different probabilistic and heuristic models, we find evidence that Gaussian process function learning-combined with an optimistic upper confidence bound sampling strategy-provides a robust account of how people use generalization to guide search. Our modelling results and parameter estimates are recoverable and can be used to simulate human-like performance, providing insights about human behaviour in complex environments.

Position preference and position change of hiders in the game of hide-and-seek

We study common tendencies adult hiders have in choosing and changing positions in the game of hide-and-seek. In our case, the game takes the form of commercial and homemade advent calendars in which the creator has hidden Numbers 1, 2, . . ., 24 in a seemingly random way. By comparing the numberings in the 332 human-generated calendars with random numberings, we identify common tendencies that hiders share. We observe that hiders hide things far apart and spread out from each other, the behavior which is consistent with, but concurrently extends previous research on hiding and its connection with subjective randomness.