High-fidelity social learning via shared episodic memories enhances collaborative foraging through mnemonic convergence

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that high-fidelity social learning via shared episodic memories significantly improves collaborative foraging efficiency and mnemonic alignment among agents, highlighting the importance of memory fidelity and length in collective behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a neurocomputational model showing how shared episodic memories with high fidelity enhance group performance and mnemonic convergence in collective foraging tasks.

Findings

High-fidelity social learning improves resource collection efficiency.

Low-fidelity social learning leads to diverse, less effective mnemonic patterns.

Optimal episodic memory length exists beyond which performance plateaus.

Abstract

Social learning, a cornerstone of cultural evolution, enables individuals to acquire knowledge by observing and imitating others. At the heart of its efficacy lies episodic memory, which encodes specific behavioral sequences to facilitate learning and decision-making. This study explores the interrelation between episodic memory and social learning in collective foraging. Using Sequential Episodic Control (SEC) agents capable of sharing complete behavioral sequences stored in episodic memory, we investigate how variations in the frequency and fidelity of social learning influence collaborative foraging performance. Furthermore, we analyze the effects of social learning on the content and distribution of episodic memories across the group. High-fidelity social learning is shown to consistently enhance resource collection efficiency and distribution, with benefits sustained across memory lengths. In contrast, low-fidelity learning fails to outperform nonsocial learning, spreading diverse but ineffective mnemonic patterns. Novel analyses using mnemonic metrics reveal that high-fidelity social learning also fosters mnemonic group alignment and equitable resource distribution, while low-fidelity conditions increase mnemonic diversity without translating to performance gains. Additionally, we identify an optimal range for episodic memory length in this task, beyond which performance plateaus. These findings underscore the critical effects of social learning on mnemonic group alignment and distribution and highlight the potential of neurocomputational models to probe the cognitive mechanisms driving cultural evolution.