One major way that people engage in adaptive problem solving is by imitating others’ solutions. Prominent simulation models have found imperfect imitation advantageous, but the interactions between copying amount and other prevalent aspects of social learning strategies have been underexplored. Here, we explore the consequences for a group when its members engage in strategies with different degrees of copying, solving search problems of varying complexity, in different network topologies that affect the solutions visible to each member. Using a computational model of collective problem solving, we demonstrate that the advantage of partial copying is robust across these conditions, arising from its ability to maintain diversity. Partial copying delays convergence generally but especially in globally connected networks, which are typically associated with diversity loss, allowing more exploration of a problem space.We show that a moderate amount of diversity maintenance is optimal and strategies can be adjusted to find that sweet spot.
Tag Archives: search
A Social Interpolation model of group problem-solving
How do people use information from others to solve complex problems? Prior work has addressed this question by placing people in social learning situations where the problems they were asked to solve required varying degrees of exploration. This past work uncovered important interactions between groups’ connectivity and the problem’s complexity: the advantage of less connected networks over more connected networks increased as exploration was increasingly required for optimally solving the problem at hand. We propose the Social Interpolation Model (SIM), an agent-based model to explore the cognitive mechanisms that can underlie exploratory behavior in groups. Through results from simulation experiments, we conclude that “exploration” may not be a single cognitive property, but rather the emergent result of three distinct behavioral and cognitive mechanisms, namely, (a) breadth of generalization, (b) quality of prior expectation, and (c) relative valuation of self-obtained information. We formalize these mechanisms in the SIM, and explore their effects on group dynamics and success at solving different kinds of problems. Our main finding is that broad generalization and high quality of prior expectation facilitate successful search in environments where exploration is important, and hinder successful search in environments where exploitation alone is sufficient.
How much to copy from others?
One of the major ways that people engage in adaptive problem solving is by copying the solutions of others. Most of the work on this field has focused on three questions: when to copy, who to copy from, and what to copy. However, how much to copy has been relatively less explored. In the current research, we are interested in the consequences for a group when its members engage in social learning strategies with different tendencies to copy entire or partial solutions and different complexities of search problems. We also consider different network topologies that affect the solutions visible to each member. Using a computational model of collective problem solving, we demonstrate that strategies where social learning involves partial copying outperform strategies where individuals copy entire solutions. We analyze the exploration/exploitation dynamics of these social learning strategies under the different conditions.
Simple Threshold Rules Solve Explore/Exploit Trade-offs in a Resource Accumulation Search Task
How, and how well, do people switch between exploration and exploitation to search for and accumulate resources? We study the decision processes underlying such exploration/exploitation trade-offs using a novel card selection task that captures the common situation of searching among multiple resources (e.g., jobs) that can be exploited without depleting. With experience, participants learn to switch appropriately between exploration and exploitation and approach optimal performance. We model participants’ behavior on this task with random, threshold, and sampling strategies, and find that a linear decreasing threshold rule best fits participants’ results. Further evidence that participants use decreasing threshold-based strategies comes from reaction time differences between exploration and exploitation; however, participants themselves report nondecreasing thresholds. Decreasing threshold strategies that “front-load” exploration and switch quickly to exploitation are particularly effective in resource accumulation tasks, in contrast to optimal stopping problems like the Secretary Problem requiring longer exploration.
The Great Melting Pot: generating diversity by combining solutions across a global population
One of the major ways that people engage in adaptive problem solving is by copying or imitating the solutions of others. Imitation saves an individual time and mitigates potential risks from individual trial-and-error learning. When an individual finds a neighbor with a better solution than theirs, copying their entire solution guarantees an improvement over the individual’s current condition. However, this reduces the diversity of solutions in the group and can lead the group to getting stuck in a local optima. One alternative is to copy the neighbor’s solution only partially, although this comes at a risk for the individual. Mixing two solutions may or may not lead to an improvement over their previous solution, but mixing has the potential to allow the group to explore entirely new areas of solution space. So, although partial copying comes at a cost to the individual, under what conditions does it benefit the group? In the current research, we are interested in the consequences for the group when its members engage in social learning strategies with different tendencies to copy entire or partial solutions, with different network topologies that affect the neighbors’ solutions visible to each member, and with different complexities of search tasks.