Evolution of heterogeneous perceptual limits and indifference in competitive foraging

by Richard P. Mann The collective behaviour of animal and human groups emerges from the individual decisions and actions of their constituent members. Recent research has revealed many ways in which the behaviour of groups can be influenced by differences amongst their constituent individuals. The existence of indiv idual differences that have implications for collective behaviour raises important questions. How are these differences generated and maintained? Are individual differences driven by exogenous factors, or are they a response to the social dilemmas these groups face? Here I consider the classic case of patch selection by foraging agents under conditions of social competition. I introduce a multilevel model wherein the perceptual sensitivities of agents evolve in response to their foraging success or failure over repeated patch selections. This model reveals a bifurcation in the population, crea ting a class of agents with no perceptual sensitivity. These agents exploit the social environment to avoid the costs of accurate perception, relying on other agents to make fitness rewards insensitive to the choice of foraging patch. This provides a individual-based evolutionary basis for models in corporating perceptual limits that have been proposed to explain observed deviations from the Ideal Free Distribution (IFD) in empirical studies, while showing that the common assumption in such models that agents share identical sensory limits is likely false. Further analysis ...
Source: PLoS Computational Biology - Category: Biology Authors: Source Type: research