Biology subjects

Deffner, D.

Publications and source records attributed to Deffner, D..

7 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Social foragers rely more on dynamic cues than prior beliefs in unpredictable natural environments

Foraging is a prime example of adaptive decision-making in uncertain and changing environments. Foragers need to continuously integrate their direct experiences and observations of what others are doing with what they already know about the distribution of prey. Yet little is known about the importance of prior knowledge relative to dynamically sampled information in social foraging settings. Here, we investigated the role of prior beliefs in five large-scale ice-fishing competitions involving 49--53 highly experienced ice-fishers in 251 foraging trips. To quantify their prior spatial beliefs, participants marked areas they believed to have high resource abundance on topographic maps containing isoclines (i.e., depth curves) before each competition. GPS devices and headcams tracked behavioural states and foraging success. We found that prior beliefs about the fish distribution are to a large extent driven by lake topography and therefore converge across individuals. However, these prior beliefs were not systematically linked to foraging success. While prior beliefs predicted spot choices, especially in the beginning of competitions, they were heavily outweighed by dynamic personal and social information sources. Exploring how the use of prior beliefs differed between foraging trips, we found that high reliance on prior beliefs was associated with reduced avoidance of unsuccessful locations which resulted in limited spatial exploration. We conclude that dynamic information sampling and accumulation are key processes in social foraging decisions, with prior spatial beliefs playing only a minor role in natural environments where resources are hard to predict in advance.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2026

Tracking human foragers and their prey reveals adaptive predator-prey dynamics

Hunting for mobile prey is thought to have played a key role in hominin evolution, by providing high-quality nutrition that supported the development of the exceptionally large human brain. However, human-prey dynamics remain poorly understood because studies have not yet tracked human foragers and their prey simultaneously. Here, we employ high resolution tracking of groups of human foragers (ice-fishers) and their prey (fish shoals) to study human-prey dynamics. Our results show that foragers adaptively combined personal and social information in deciding where to forage and for how long, closely matching the prey distribution. Prey responded dynamically to human exploitation, showing increased attraction to fishing activity, alongside decreased biting probability. Furthermore, we found that foragers adaptively relied on memory, preferentially returning to areas with high prey presence, particularly when their current return rate was low. Our results show how human foragers overcome the challenges of extracting invisible, mobile and reactive prey by tightly tuning patch-selection, patch-leaving and patch-return decisions to the distribution and behaviour of their prey.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2025

Real-Time Human Interaction with Virtual Swarms in Shared Physical Space

Human-swarm interaction (HSI) explores how humans engage with distributed collective systems, aiming to incorporate human cognition into scalable and robust robotic swarms. While most HSI research focuses on remote teleoperation via engineered interfaces, real-world integration of swarms into everyday tasks requires natural, embodied interactions in shared physical spaces. To address the limitations of traditional teleoperation studies, and the high resource demands of using physical robot swarms for HSI research, we introduce CoBe XR, a spatial augmented reality system that projects virtual swarms into the physical environment of the human operator. CoBe XR enables real-time, fine-grained, natural interaction between humans and swarm-like agents through full-body movement without dedicated control interfaces or prior training. As a proof-of-concept, we present a behavioral study involving 40 participants who influenced swarm behavior solely through walking. Our results show that human participants were able to adapt to the collective dynamics of the swarm and control it through natural perception-motion control in a shared physical space. We argue that similar extended reality systems can not only reveal how humans perceive and adapt to collective dynamics, but they offer a general platform to understand human behavior or an intermediate solution to design embodied robot swarms.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2023

Visual social information use in collective foraging

Collective dynamics emerge from individual-level decisions, yet we still poorly understand the link between individual-level decision-making processes and collective outcomes in realistic physical systems. Using collective foraging to study the key trade-off between personal and social information use, we present a mechanistic, spatially-explicit agent-based model that combines individual-level evidence accumulation of personal and (visual) social cues with particle-based movement. Under idealized conditions without physical constraints, our mechanistic framework reproduces findings from established probabilistic models, but explains how individual-level decision processes generate collective outcomes in a bottom-up way. In clustered environments, groups performed best if agents reacted strongly to social information, while in uniform environments, individualistic search was most beneficial. Incorporating different real-world physical and perceptual constraints profoundly shaped collective performance, and could even buffer maladaptive herding by facilitating self-organized exploration. Our study uncovers the mechanisms linking individual cognition to collective outcomes in human and animal foraging and paves the way for decentralized robotic applications. Significance statementFinding and collecting rewards in heterogeneous environments is key for adaptive collective behavior in humans, animals and machines. We present an open agent-based simulation framework to study how social information use shapes collective foraging from the bottom up. Our model combines individual evidence accumulation with spatially explicit movement. Our results connect individual-level decisions to collective dynamics in realistic physical environments, highlighting the key role of real-world constraints, thereby bringing us closer to embodied collective intelligence. Our work introduces a flexible platform to study the interplay between individual cognitive and perceptual biases, agents physical environment and the resulting collective dynamics and thus paves the way for fully decentralized mobile robot applications.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2023

Visual-spatial dynamics drive adaptive social learning in immersive environments

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 driven by individual foraging success (rather than social factors). Furthermore, it is the degree of adaptivity--of both asocial and social learning--that best predicts individual performance. These findings not only integrate theories across asocial and social domains, but also provide key insights into the adaptability of human decision-making in complex and dynamic social landscapes.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2023

Leading an urban invasion: risk-sensitive learning is a winning strategy

In the unpredictable Anthropocene, a particularly pressing open question is how certain species invade urban environments. Sex-biased dispersal and learning arguably influence movement ecology, but their joint influence remains unexplored empirically, and might vary by space and time. We assayed reinforcement learning in wild-caught, temporarily-captive core-, middle- or edge-range great-tailed grackles--a bird species undergoing urban-tracking rapid range expansion, led by dispersing males. We show: across populations, both sexes initially perform similarly when learning stimulus-reward pairings, but, when reward contingencies reverse, male--versus female--grackles finish relearning faster, making fewer choice-option switches. How do male grackles do this? Bayesian cognitive modelling revealed male grackles choice behaviour is governed more strongly by the weight of relative differences in recent foraging payoffs--i.e., they show more pronounced risk-sensitive learning. Confirming this mechanism, agent-based forward simulations of reinforcement learning--where we simulate birds based on empirical estimates of our grackles reinforcement learning--replicate our sex-difference behavioural data. Finally, evolutionary modelling revealed natural selection should favour risk-sensitive learning in hypothesised urban-like environments: stable but stochastic settings. Together, these results imply risk-sensitive learning is a winning strategy for urban-invasion leaders, underscoring the potential for life history and cognition to shape invasion success in human-modified environments.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2021

Effective population size for culturally evolving traits

Population size has long been considered an important driver of cultural diversity and complexity. Results from population genetics, however, demonstrate that in populations with complex demographic structure or mode of inheritance, it is not the census population size, N, but the effective size of a population, Ne, that determines important evolutionary parameters. Here, we examine the concept of effective population size for traits that evolve culturally, through processes of innovation and social learning. We use mathematical and computational modeling approaches to investigate how cultural Ne and levels of diversity depend on (1) the way traits are learned, (2) population connectedness, and (3) social network structure. We show that one-to-many and frequency-dependent transmission can temporally or permanently lower effective population size compared to census numbers. We caution that migration and cultural exchange can have counter-intuitive effects on Ne. Network density in random networks leaves Ne unchanged, scale-free networks tend to decrease and small-world networks tend to increase Ne compared to census numbers. For one-to-many transmission and different network structures, effective size and cultural diversity are closely associated. For connectedness, however, even small amounts of migration and cultural exchange result in high diversity independently of Ne. Our results highlight the importance of carefully defining effective population size for cultural systems and show that inferring Ne requires detailed knowledge about underlying cultural and demographic processes. AUTHOR SUMMARYHuman populations show immense cultural diversity and researchers have regarded population size as an important driver of cultural variation and complexity. Our approach is based on cultural evolutionary theory which applies ideas about evolution to understand how cultural traits change over time. We employ insights from population genetics about the "effective" size of a population (i.e. the size that matters for important evolutionary outcomes) to understand how and when larger populations can be expected to be more culturally diverse. Specifically, we provide a formal derivation for cultural effective population size and use mathematical and computational models to study how effective size and cultural diversity depend on (1) the way culture is transmitted, (2) levels of migration and cultural exchange, as well as (3) social network structure. Our results highlight the importance of effective sizes for cultural evolution and provide heuristics for empirical researchers to decide when census numbers could be used as proxies for the theoretically relevant effective numbers and when they should not.

evolutionary biology↗