Learning Rules for Social Foragers: Implications for the Producer–Scrounger Game and Ideal Free Distribution Theory

Abstract

In population games, the optimal behaviour of a forager depends partly on courses of action selected by other individuals in the population. How individuals learn to allocate effort in foraging games involving frequency-dependent payoffs has been little examined. The performance of three different learning rules was investigated in several types of habitats in each of two population games. Learning rules allow individuals to weigh information about the past and the present and to choose among alternative patterns of behaviour. In the producer–scrounger game, foragers use producer to locate food patches and scrounger to exploit the food discoveries of others. In the ideal free distribution game, foragers that experience feeding interference from companions distribute themselves among heterogeneous food patches. In simulations of each population game, the use of different learning rules induced large variation in foraging behaviour, thus providing a tool to assess the relevance of each learning rule in experimental systems. Rare mutants using alternative learning rules often successfully invaded populations of foragers using other rules indicating that some learning rules are not stable when pitted against each other. Learning rules often closely approximated optimal behaviour in each population game suggesting that stimulus–response learning of contingencies created by foraging companions could be sufficient to perform at near-optimal level in two population games.