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.
Highlights
Children encountering the venerable game of Battleship may try out the simple strategy of positioning all their ships—the carrier, sub, patrol boat, and so on—in one big clump, perhaps cleverly offset from the center of the board to provide their seeking opponent an extra tough challenge
Because we are interested in human expectations regarding spatial resource distributions as revealed in how people hide and find multiple resources in multiple locations, we focus on scatter hoarding here
To test what type of resource distributions participants chose for hiding their dollar tokens from the other players in competitive and collaborative settings, we computed the overall alternation probability p(A) of each participant’s 2D grid pattern
Summary
Children encountering the venerable game of Battleship may try out the simple strategy of positioning all their ships—the carrier, sub, patrol boat, and so on—in one big clump, perhaps cleverly offset from the center of the board to provide their seeking opponent an extra tough challenge. In doing so, they are mirroring the food-hiding strategies of many animal species. In this paper we move from the onedimensional temporal case to investigate when people will expect clumpy or patchy resources in two-dimensional space. We do this using a simplified version of the Battleship game in which players both hide and search for resources in a spatial grid, varying whether they are working collaboratively (“hiding” resources so that others can find them) or competitively (hiding resources to be difficult to find). We place these questions in the context of animal hoarding and foraging strategies and past research on human hiding and seeking, before describing the game and results and discussing the implications regarding human expectations of environment structure
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