title: A Game of Hide and Seek: Expectations of Clumpy Resources Influence Hiding and Searching Patterns.
abstract: Resources are often distributed in clumps or patches in space, unless an agent is trying to protect them from discovery and theft using a dispersed distribution. We uncover human expectations of such spatial resource patterns in collaborative and competitive settings via a sequential multi-person game in which participants hid resources for the next participant to seek. When collaborating, resources were mostly hidden in clumpy distributions, but when competing, resources were hidden in more dispersed (random or hyperdispersed) patterns to increase the searching difficulty for the other player. More dispersed resource distributions came at the cost of higher overall hiding (as well as searching) times, decreased payoffs, and an increased difficulty when the hider had to recall earlier hiding locations at the end of the experiment. Participants' search strategies were also affected by their underlying expectations, using a win-stay lose-shift strategy appropriate for clumpy resources when searching for collaboratively-hidden items, but moving equally far after finding or not finding an item in competitive settings, as appropriate for dispersed resources. Thus participants showed expectations for clumpy versus dispersed spatial resources that matched the distributions commonly found in collaborative versus competitive foraging settings.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY, United States of America.
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Wilke
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY, United States of America.
authors.forename: Steven
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Minich
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Lyon, Lyon, France.
authors.forename: Megane
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Panis
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY, United States of America; Department of Biology, Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY, United States of America.
authors.forename: Tom A
authors.initials: TA
authors.lastname: Langen
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY, United States of America.
authors.forename: Joseph D
authors.initials: JD
authors.lastname: Skufca
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Science Program, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, United States of America.
authors.forename: Peter M
authors.initials: PM
authors.lastname: Todd
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D005260:Female; D005716:Game Theory; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D008960:Models, Psychological; D011336:Probability; D011340:Problem Solving / Q000502:physiology*; D012919:Social Behavior; D055815:Young Adult