Visual social information use in collective foraging
Fig 4
Effects of limited field of view (FOV).
The illustration on the top right shows an exploring agent with a FOV limited to ϕ = [−L, L]. Agent 2 is fully visible, agent 3 is only partially visible and agent 1 is fully out of view. The resulting visual projection V(ϕ, t) is shown in black for visible parts of other agents and in grey for invisible parts. The left panel shows the absolute foraging efficiency (including standard deviations across simulation runs) for different FOVs, and for different levels of social excitability (ϵw). Results are shown for different group sizes in rows and resource distributions in columns. The bottom right panel shows demonstrative simulation frames for single scenarios (A-C) with ϵw = 2 in intermediate environments. Different FOVs are labeled in the corresponding plot on the left. In patchy and intermediate environments, typically there exists an optimal intermediate FOV that maximizes search efficiency. In uniform environments, “blind” agents are the most effective.