Socioecology drives adaptive social foraging dynamics in the wild

Foraging complexity and competitive social challenges are considered key drivers of human cognition. Yet, we still have a poor understanding of the decision-making mechanisms underlying foraging behaviour, especially in social contexts. Here, we use high-resolution tracking data in combination with computational and agent-based models to uncover the mechanisms guiding the decisions where to forage and when to leave a patch. Equipping large groups of Finnish ice-fishers competing for resources with global positioning systems and headcams, and analyzing 477 foraging trips and 16,055 individual choices across different foraging ecologies, reveals that foragers use foraging success, social information and landscape features to locate resource patches. Foragers adaptively arbitrate between social and asocial information sources, relying less on social information when successful. Patch-leaving decisions are mostly driven by foraging success, with high resource abundance eliciting lower giving-up times. Guided by these findings, we construct an agent-based model capturing the spatio-temporal dynamics of our field observations, showing that patch discoveries induce localized search, a process which is amplified by high social densities. Our work sheds light on the mechanisms guiding human foraging behaviour and provides a template for harnessing high-resolution tracking data to study human cognition in the real world.