Exploration-exploitation trade-off features a saltatory search behaviour

TL;DR

This paper investigates the exploration-exploitation trade-off in human search behavior, revealing scale-free patterns and modeling saltatory search strategies ranging from Levy flights to Brownian walks.

Contribution

It introduces an analytical statistical model of the exploration-exploitation trade-off that captures diverse saltatory search behaviors observed in humans.

Findings

Scale-free search activity observed across genders.

Model reproduces Levy flights and Brownian walks.

Provides insights into human search strategies.

Abstract

Searching experiments conducted in different virtual environments over a gender balanced group of people revealed a gender irrelevant scale-free spread of searching activity on large spatiotemporal scales. We have suggested and solved analytically a simple statistical model of the coherent-noise type describing the exploration-exploitation trade-off in humans ("should I stay or should I go"). The model exhibits a variety of saltatory behaviours, ranging from Levy flights occurring under uncertainty to Brownian walks performed by a treasure hunter confident of the eventual success.