Limited Attention is Beneficial for Collective Foraging

What is it about?

Animals, including humans, have a limited attentional capacity, which can be important when looking for things. When you search for something familiar, like your keys, you think of how it looks and scan your surroundings for those specific details. Finding the object can depend on how easy it is to spot, what's around it, how quickly you're looking, and how effectively you search. For example, if you're trying to find both your shiny keys and your black notebook at the same time, it can be tough because you can't focus on both objects easily. In the wild, animals hunt for food in groups, but because they have limited attention, they might miss some of their prey while searching. Many prey animals even try to blend in with their surroundings to avoid being seen. To catch these sneaky prey, animals can develop “search images,” which are specific features they look for when hunting. When animals focus their attention on one kind of prey using these search images, they may become better at finding that type, but may overlook others. So, while an eagle might catch more snakes by focusing on their pattern, it could end up missing out on other animals, like hares. Now, let’s think about how this works in a group of birds. If one bird starts looking for worms in a spot, it might not have a specific search image at first and finds prey randomly. But once it finds and eats a worm, the bird will start to pay more attention to them, and thus find them more often. If a second bird comes to that spot, it may find more crickets because the first bird has eaten most of the worms. As a result, the second bird will focus on crickets instead. Over time, each bird ends up specializing in different types of prey, which helps them hunt together without competing directly for the same food. While it might seem like limited attention is a disadvantage from an evolutionary standpoint, it actually helps reduce competition among animals in a group, leading to better chances of survival. The indirect interaction between the attention of two separate birds, which we've called “attentional character displacement,” has led us to explore two main questions: What conditions elicit a search image, and when does having a search image benefit the group?

Featured Image

Photo by Abdul Rehman Khalid on Unsplash

Photo by Abdul Rehman Khalid on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Our work explores why attention is limited from an evolutionary perspective. We examine what initially seems like a hindrance in animal cognition and unveil a major benefit of cognitive constraints. Cognition is full of these "gives and takes," balances between cost and benefit, self and group. Limited attention is common, and while it may seem disadvantageous, it decreases competition between group members, which in turn increases survival. How? Through “attentional character displacement,” which we define and explore in detail. We also focus on the group-level benefits of search images.

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