Visual social information use in collective foraging
Fig 3
The left panel shows the absolute search efficiency (including standard deviations across simulation runs) for different social excitability values (ϵw), separately for idealized vision without occlusions (solid yellow) and for more realistic vision with visual occlusions (blue). Results are shown for different group sizes in rows and resource distributions in columns. The right panel shows demonstrative simulation frames to illustrate single scenarios (A-D) with large groups (NA = 100) and large ϵw where the difference between idealized and realistic vision is largest. In case of idealized vision (B, D), agents tend to stay closer together and fail to explore the environment sufficiently. More realistic visual occlusion (A, C) prevents the over-exploitation of social information and maintains high levels of foraging efficiency even in highly social groups.