"Markov models of sequential decision-making for social animal groups"Sigalou, AnnaFaced with choices under uncertainty, social animals source information from their conspecifics. This social information can help mitigate against poor personal information, and ameliorate decision-making quality; but it may also amplify poor information, leading to poor information cascades. A crucial factor in determining the outcome of social decision-making is the way social information is used by animals -i.e. their decision-making strategy. By modeling decision-making as a Markov process, we can get insights about the long-term tendencies of different decision-making strategies. Subsequently we can infer which strategies are more prone to traits such as poor information cascades. Lastly, by comparing the observed behaviour of different species and the predictions on the aforementioned models, we can make educated guesses about the underlying decision-making mechanisms these species follow. |
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