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

所有移动生物一生中的大部分时间都在寻找某种东西，无论是食物、水、住所，还是其他类似的东西。搜索使用感知、记忆、认知和行动。它可以发生在广阔的地形和一段时间内，就像鲸鱼的迁徙行为一样。根据稍纵即逝的感官证据，它可以在一秒钟内发生，就像青蛙在视野中搜索苍蝇一样。它发生在两者之间的所有尺度上，跨越有机体，也跨越给定有机体的不同行为。在这方面，人类搜索是特别多样化的，因为人类搜索的范围从亚原子到人类，再到宇宙探索。在国家科学基金会的支持下，克里斯托弗·凯洛博士正在加州大学默塞德分校领导一个研究团队，研究三个截然不同但相互补充的领域的人类搜索行为：在大型虚拟空间中搜寻，在场景和电影中进行视觉搜索，在单词和概念上进行记忆搜索。搜索的普遍性和进化重要性表明，搜索功能可能会在不同的规模和领域之间共享共同的原则。这一猜想的证据已经在描述不同长度的片段在搜索路径中出现的频率的“Levy分布”中找到。这些频率被观察到在广泛的不同搜索行为中遵守一个共同的比例定律，但目前的证据不足以确定该定律的含义。在认知和信息科学三名教员的指导下，本科生和研究生以及一名博士后研究员将在三个感兴趣的领域中的每一个领域合作实验和计算模型，在独特的和高度跨学科的教育和研究体验中。

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.