Visual social information use in collective foraging
Fig 5
Effects of physical collisions.
The right panel shows the absolute foraging efficiency (including standard deviations across simulation runs) for different patch sizes (containing the same amount of resource units) and social excitability values (ϵw) in different environments (columns). The first row shows results for simulations where overlaps are allowed and vision is idealized. In the second row, overlaps are impossible but vision is still idealized. In the third row, agents cannot overlap and can visually occlude social information. The left panel shows exemplary simulation frames for single scenarios (A-F) in patchy environments. Different constellations of social excitability, overlap and occlusion are labeled in the corresponding plots on the right. In general, collisions reduce the value of social information, making more social groups less efficient. Introducing additional visual occlusions can recover efficiency of social groups through the visual shielding of inaccessible social information.