{"pk":26220,"title":"Collective search on rugged landscapes:A cross-environmental analysis","subtitle":null,"abstract":"In groups and organizations, agents use both individual and so-cial learning to solve problems. The balance between these twoactivities can lead collectives to very different levels of perfor-mance. We model collective search as a combination of simplelearning strategies to conduct the first large-scale comparativestudy, across fifteen challenging environments and two differ-ent network structures. In line with previous findings in thesocial learning literature, collectives using a hybrid of individ-ual and social learning perform much better than specialistsusing only one or the other. Importantly, we find that collec-tive performance varies considerably across different task en-vironments, and that different types of network structures canbe superior, depending on the environment. These results sug-gest that recent contradictions in the social learning literaturemay be due to methodological differences between two sepa-rate research traditions, studying disjoint sets of environmentsthat lead to divergent findings.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Social learning; communication networks; collec-tive behavior; search; rugged landscapes."}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6f35t0qw","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Daniel","middle_name":"","last_name":"Barkoczi","name_suffix":"","institution":"Max Planck Institute for Human Development","department":""},{"first_name":"Pantelis","middle_name":"P.","last_name":"Analytis","name_suffix":"","institution":"Max Planck Institute for Human Development","department":""},{"first_name":"Charley","middle_name":"M.","last_name":"Wu","name_suffix":"","institution":"Max Planck Institute for Human Development","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T13:00:00-05:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26220/galley/15856/download/"}]}