Computational modelling of team foraging to understand human behaviour and cognition

This studentship will investigate spatial exploration and how it is affected by social context. Using a foraging paradigm in a virtual environment, where human participants need to gather targets as quickly as possible, the project will investigate, characterise, and model how people explore complex environments, both on their own and also when they work as part of a team.

This studentship provides an exciting opportunity to make key theoretical contributions to our understanding of the cognitive processes underlying exploration behaviour, and to see applications of their research via the collaborative partner, the US DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory. The project will give the student a wealth of research experience both in an academic and an industry setting, and will be particularly suited to students who wish to develop their career working within or in collaboration with applied research settings.

The aim of this project is to investigate, characterise and model how people explore complex environments, both on their own and also when they work as part of a team. We will use a foraging task in which participants are placed in a virtual environment and asked to collect as many targets as they can. The starting point for the project will be the recent Clarke et al. (2022) model of the visual foraging paradigm and during the project, we will integrate the methodology from this study with the social exploration experimental results.

The project will aim to ask three main questions. These questions cover a range of different spatial exploration scenarios, thus offering a thorough characterisation of human behaviour in this task in a way that will be highly relevant for human-agent teams in the military context, where teamwork, the presence of threats and the use of 'Heads Up Displays' (HUDs) as navigational aids are all common.

1) How does behaviour in a virtual foraging task change when participants are completing the task collaboratively or competitively?
2) How is behaviour affected by the presence of an out-group "threat"?
3) How is behaviour affected by the use of navigational aids?