Decision Making in a Complex World: How Human Foragers Integrate Information from Their Environment, Personal Experience, and Conspecifics

Adaptive decision making is central to how organisms navigate complex, changing environments. For humans, this involves continuously integrating multiple information sources, including prior knowledge on the environment (environmental information), information from interacting with the environment (personal sampling information), and information from others (social information). While these components have been studied in isolation in laboratory settings, we know little about how humans dynamically integrate these information streams in the real world.

To bridge this gap, we focus on a prime example of continuous decision making: human foraging. Using ice fishing as a novel study system, we investigate how individuals adapt their foraging strategies across different social contexts—solitary, competitive, and cooperative foraging. In a series of large-scale experiments, we equipped Finnish ice fishers with GPS trackers and head-mounted cameras to collect high-resolution data on movement and behaviour across various socio-ecological settings.

In this talk, I will introduce the project and share early insights into how social context may shape foraging behaviour. Building on my previous work with free-ranging birds, I apply similar methods to study human behaviour in the wild—demonstrating how approaches from animal ecology can be extended to research on human decision making beyond the lab.