title: Exploration-exploitation trade-off features a saltatory search behaviour.
abstract: Searching experiments conducted in different virtual environments over a gender-balanced group of people revealed a gender irrelevant scale-free spread of searching activity on large spatio-temporal scales. We have suggested and solved analytically a simple statistical model of the coherent-noise type describing the exploration-exploitation trade-off in humans ('should I stay' or 'should I go'). The model exhibits a variety of saltatory behaviours, ranging from Lévy flights occurring under uncertainty to Brownian walks performed by a treasure hunter confident of the eventual success.
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Physics, Bielefeld University, Universitaetsstrasse 25, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany. volchenk@physik.uni-bielefeld.de
authors.forename: Dimitri
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Volchenkov
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Helbach
authors.forename: Marko
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tscherepanow
authors.forename: Sina
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kühnel
mesh_terms: D005106:Exploratory Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008954:Models, Biological; D014584:User-Computer Interface
keywords: Lévy foraging hypothesis; exploration–exploitation trade-off; virtual environments