Dr. Tom Sherratt Carleton University Not all who wander are lost: exploration-exploitation dilemmas, and how animals resolve them There is frequently a trade-off between gaining new information (exploration) and using current information (exploitation). In some instances, this trade-off is mundane: should we play it safe and buy a familiar brand of wine we know is good (exploit), or take a risk and try a new brand that might be even better (explore)? In other instances, the trade-off is a matter of life and death: at what point in a clinical trial should researchers exploit their available information and switch all patients to an experimental drug if it looks like it works? Likewise, non-human animals regularly face exploration-exploitation dilemmas that have fitness consequences: should they attack an unfamiliar type of prey in the hope that it is edible (explore), or trust their instincts and leave it alone (exploit)? Should they continue to graze in the current field, or move elsewhere where the grass may be greener?
In this talk, I highlight the ubiquity of exploration-exploitation dilemmas and introduce the analytical and numerical techniques to solve them. Once the solutions are described, I show how many widely observed phenomena, from age-dependent neophobia in great tits to polymorphisms in butterflies, can be understood as a consequence of animals seeking to resolve this trade-off. The solution techniques to exploration-exploitation models are computationally demanding, and animals cannot possibly solve them by “doing the math”. Indeed, I describe experimental evidence showing how simple “rules of thumb” are able to predict the behaviour of decision-makers far better than the exact solution. Finally, I show how two separate Bayesian approaches to decision making in behavioral ecology, namely signal detection models (which predict strategic behaviour assuming complete information) and exploration-exploitation models (which predict strategic behaviour as information is gained), are deeply connected, with the former a special case of the latter. Comments are closed.
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