Levy Distributions in Foraging Games, Scene Perception, and Semantic Memory

所有可移动的生物一生中大部分时间都在寻找某种东西，无论是食物、水、住所还是其他同类。搜索使用感知、记忆、认知和行动。它可以发生在广阔的景观和一段时间内，就像鲸鱼的迁徙行为一样。它可以在一秒钟内根据转瞬即逝的感官证据发生，就像青蛙在视野中搜寻苍蝇一样。它发生在所有的尺度之间，在生物体之间，也发生在一个给定生物体的不同行为中。在这方面，人类的搜索尤其多样化，因为人类的搜索范围从亚原子到人类再到宇宙尺度的探索。在美国国家科学基金会（National Science Foundation）的支持下，克里斯托弗·凯洛（Christopher Kello）博士领导着加州大学默塞德分校（University of California, Merced）的一个研究小组，在三个截然不同但又互补的领域研究人类的搜索行为：在大型虚拟空间中觅食，在场景和电影中进行视觉搜索，在单词和概念中进行记忆搜索。搜索的普遍性和进化重要性表明，搜索功能可能在不同的尺度和领域共享共同的原则。这个猜想的证据已经在“利维分布”中被发现，它描述了不同长度的片段在搜索路径中出现的频率。这些频率被观察到在广泛的不同搜索行为中遵循一个共同的比例定律，但目前的证据不足以确定这个定律的含义。在三位认知和信息科学教师的指导下，本科生、研究生和博士后将在三个感兴趣的领域进行实验和计算模型的合作，这是一种独特的、高度跨学科的教育和研究经历。

All mobile organisms spend much of their lives searching for something, be it food, water, shelter, or others of their kind. Searching uses perception, memory, cognition, and action. It can occur over vast landscapes and periods of time, as in whale migration behaviors. It can occur in under a second on the basis of fleeting bits of sensory evidence, as in frogs searching their visual fields for flies. And it occurs on all scales in between, across organisms but also across different behaviors of a given organism. Human search is especially diverse in this regard because human searches range from subatomic to human to cosmic scales of exploration.With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Christopher Kello is leading a team of researchers at the University of California, Merced, in the study of human search behaviors in three very different but complementary domains: Foraging over large virtual spaces, visual searches over scenes and movies, and memory searches over words and concepts. The generality and evolutionary importance of search suggests that search functions may share common principles across scales and domains. Evidence for this conjecture has been found in "Levy distributions" that describe the frequencies with which segments of different lengths occur in search paths. These frequencies are observed to obey a common scaling law across a wide range of different search behaviors but current evidence is not sufficient to determine the meaning of this law.With mentorship from three faculty members in Cognitive and Information Sciences, undergraduate and graduate students and a postdoctoral fellow will collaborate on experiments and computational models in each of the three domains of interest, in a unique and highly interdisciplinary education and research experience.