Past event
Prof. Gabriel Ramos-Fernandez (IIMS): Collective pooling of foraging information in spider monkeys School of Psychology and Neuroscience Friday seminar series
The School of Psychology and Neuroscience seminar series presents a talk by Prof. Gabriel Ramos-Fernandez (IIMS) which will be hosted by Prof. Josep Call in Seminar Room 1 and accessible online through MS Teams.
Abstract:
Pooling individual information about foraging areas is one of the benefits of sociality. Because spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi) forage in wide areas and are continuously splitting and joining others, they could be pooling their partial information so that the group as a whole has a more complete picture of a heterogenous foraging environment than any single individual. In this work we use individual utilization areas over a realistic foraging landscape to infer the sets of trees potentially well known by each individual. We measure how complementary different pairs of areas are by measuring their redundant and unique components in terms of area and spatial entropy. We find that the areas uniquely known by each pair contain considerable amounts of information (particularly in the dry, scarcer seasons), but there is also a high redundancy in the information they have about the foraging landscape. We compare these results with a theoretical prediction of optimal levels of redundancy for information sharing and present advances on how to analyze information sharing among sets larger than the pair.