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Title: | SOCIAL LEARNING AND COGNITION: THE CONSTRAINTS OF LIMITED AND DIVIDED ATTENTION |
Authors: | Guayasamin, Olivia Lenhardt |
Advisors: | Couzin, Iain D Rubenstein, Daniel I |
Contributors: | Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department |
Keywords: | Attention Decision Making Eye-Tracking Human Behavior Information Social Learning |
Subjects: | Behavioral sciences Animal sciences Quantitative psychology |
Issue Date: | 2021 |
Publisher: | Princeton, NJ : Princeton University |
Abstract: | Attention is a cognitive resource that facilitates the perception, prioritization, andprocessing of meaningful information in a complex world. In natural environments attention is always split between guiding goal-driven actions and remaining vigilant for rapid environmental changes and potential threats. In the animal behavior literature, a well-known example is maintaining social vigilance while simultaneously foraging for resources. However, our understanding of how attention and other cognitive mechanisms shape behavior and learning during social foraging scenarios is limited. This is because it remains incredibly difficult to reliably quantify the amount, timing, and location of animal attention under natural conditions. Therefore, the goal of this dissertation is to use humans as a model system to demonstrate the fundamental importance of understanding how attention moderates learning and performance in complex social environments. In the first chapter, I present an overview of animal social learning and argue that mechanism-neutral social learning strategies (SLSs) no longer provide a sufficient theoretical framework for the field. Chapter 2 describes the experimental methods used throughout this dissertation, introducing human eye tracking and developing a seminaturalistic visual foraging paradigm. In Chapter 3, these methods are used to demonstrate that greater search difficulty increase attentional demands and has broad, negative effects on foraging performance. As attention is a limited resource, these results strongly question the feasibility of remaining socially vigilant while completing difficult foraging tasks. Therefore, in Chapter 4 I sought to empirically determine whether a limited attention framework or the “copy when costly” SLS better predicted patterns of social information use and its effects on foraging performance. The results were striking, supporting the limited attention framework showing that foraging difficulty determined whether individuals could attend to social information, adapt to its quality, and benefit from its presence. Finally, in the last chapter I investigated how the types of attentional control evoked by different presentations of social information could influence the ability to simultaneously forage and remain socially vigilant, demonstrating the necessity of understanding and anticipating the attentional control mechanisms and cognitive loads evoked by the specific tasks in divided-attention experimental designs. |
URI: | http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp0137720g79k |
Alternate format: | The Mudd Manuscript Library retains one bound copy of each dissertation. Search for these copies in the library's main catalog: catalog.princeton.edu |
Type of Material: | Academic dissertations (Ph.D.) |
Language: | en |
Appears in Collections: | Ecology and Evolutionary Biology |
Files in This Item:
File | Description | Size | Format | |
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Guayasamin_princeton_0181D_13571.pdf | 5.01 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Download |
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