What ice fishing can teach us about making foraging decisions

"Humans are natural foragers in even the most extreme habitats, digging up tubers in the tropics, gathering mushrooms, picking berries, hunting seals in the Arctic, and fishing to meet our dietary needs. Human foraging is sufficiently complex that scientists believe that meeting so many diverse challenges helped our species develop memory, navigational abilities, social learning skills, and similar advanced cognitive functions."

"Researchers are interested in this question not just because it could help refine existing theories of social decision-making, but also could improve predictions about how different groups of humans might respond and adapt to changes in their environment. Per the authors, prior research in this area has tended to focus on solitary foragers operating in a social vacuum. And even when studying social foraging decisions, it's typically done using computational modeling and/or in the laboratory."

""We wanted to get out of the lab," said co-author Ralf Kurvers of Max Planck Institute for Human Development and TU Berlin. "The methods commonly used in cognitive psychology are difficult to scale to large, real-world social contexts. Instead, we took inspiration from studies of animal collective behavior, which routinely use cameras to automatically record behavior and GPS to provide continuous movement data for large groups of animals.""

Ice-fishing competitions were used to examine how social cues shape human foraging decisions. Ten three-hour competitions on lakes in eastern Finland involved 74 experienced ice fishers. Each participant wore a GPS tracker and a head-mounted camera to capture continuous movement, interactions, and catch outcomes. Humans forage across diverse environments, and those challenges have been linked to the evolution of memory, navigation, and social learning. Prior work often focused on solitary foragers or relied on laboratory and computational models. Methods from animal collective behavior, such as automated cameras and GPS tracking, were adapted to scale observation to large, real-world social settings.

Read at Ars Technica