Social Information Quality Determines Learned Collective Foraging Strategies

Collectively foraging animals navigate a fundamental trade-off between private exploration and using social information. This social information can be multidimensional and diverse, ranging from simple positional cues to complex payoff signals. How the types of available social cues and environmental volatility shape collective foraging behavior, however, remains unclear. We address this using a spatially explicit agent-based model in which agents learn to track a mobile resource via multi-agent reinforcement learning. Agents choose between random exploration, costly private tracking, and social attraction. We systematically varied resource volatility and the type of available social cues to analyze their effect on emergent foraging behavior.

Our results show that the quality of social information dictates the group’s collective behavior. Low-quality social cues (e.g., position, action) result in a fragile “Cohesive Tracking” strategy that is effective in stable environments but fails as volatility increases. Conversely, high-quality social information enables behavioral diversity. Agents selectively copy others and perform individual tracking or exploration depending on the environmental context.

Together, our findings demonstrate that the interplay between information quality and ecological context is a fundamental mechanism governing the emergence of distinct forms of collective intelligence from individual decision rules.