CSSSA - April Webinar
Ketika Garg will present Modeling Information Search
Searching for resources or information often requires balancing exploration for more options and exploitation of previously found ones. Individuals searching in a group face another trade-off: whether to engage in social learning to exploit the solutions found by others or to search solitarily for unexplored solutions. Social learning can better exploit learned information and decrease the costs of finding new resources, but excessive social learning can lead to over-exploitation and too little exploration for new solutions. I will talk about a model of collective foraging designed to study these trade-offs. First, I will discuss how individual search strategies affect the costs and benefits of social learning under different problem-spaces and social factors, as well as the optimal ways by which groups can be collectively efficient in finding solutions. I will then discuss results from an evolutionary model that show how social environments can, in turn, shape the evolution of individual search strategies, and the need for systems to balance explore-exploit at both individual and collective levels for efficient search.
Bio: Ketika Garg is a multidisciplinary cognitive scientist, with a background in biological sciences, and a broad interest in adaptive behavior. She studies how adaptive behavior unfolds at various scales of organization, from individuals to groups, and how they shape each other. Her work often leverages foraging models, where individuals or groups search for resources like food or information in the face of various constraints and affordances, posed by their physical and social environments, and cognitive capacities. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at CalTech, where she is further exploring the interplay between social environments and individual decisions across varied contexts: extending from traditional foraging paradigms with ethological perspectives to the emerging, new landscapes of social media. She is from India but has lived in the US for the past few years, where she is still searching for the perfect samosas.
Zoom Link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84880761984?pwd=YThLMVB3Mi94VXRNbkg2dzRqQXhWZz09