Computational modelling of team foraging to understand human behaviour and cognition

这个专业将研究空间探索以及它是如何受到社会背景的影响的。在虚拟环境中使用觅食范式，人类参与者需要尽可能快地收集目标，该项目将调查、描述和建模人们如何独自探索复杂环境，以及当他们作为团队的一部分工作时。该项目提供了一个令人兴奋的机会，为我们理解潜在的探索行为的认知过程提供了一个令人兴奋的理论贡献，并通过合作伙伴美国DEVCOM陆军研究实验室了解他们的研究应用。该项目将为学生提供丰富的学术和行业研究经验，特别适合希望在应用研究环境中或与应用研究环境合作发展其职业生涯的学生。该项目的目的是调查、描述和建模人们如何探索复杂的环境，无论是他们自己还是作为团队的一部分工作。我们将使用一个觅食任务，参与者被放置在一个虚拟环境中，并被要求收集尽可能多的目标。该项目的起点将是最近的克拉克等人。(2022)视觉觅食范式模型，在项目期间，我们将把这项研究的方法论与社会探索实验结果相结合。该项目旨在提出三个主要问题。这些问题涵盖了一系列不同的空间探索场景，从而以一种与军事环境中的人类代理团队高度相关的方式全面描述了人类在这项任务中的行为，在军事环境中，团队合作、威胁的存在以及使用‘平视显示器’(HUD)作为导航辅助设备都是常见的。1)当参与者以协作或竞争方式完成任务时，虚拟觅食任务中的行为是如何改变的？2)外部“威胁”的存在如何影响行为？3)导航辅助设备的使用如何影响行为？

This studentship will investigate spatial exploration and how it is affected by social context. Using a foraging paradigm in a virtual environment, where human participants need to gather targets as quickly as possible, the project will investigate, characterise, and model how people explore complex environments, both on their own and also when they work as part of a team. This studentship provides an exciting opportunity to make key theoretical contributions to our understanding of the cognitive processes underlying exploration behaviour, and to see applications of their research via the collaborative partner, the US DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory. The project will give the student a wealth of research experience both in an academic and an industry setting, and will be particularly suited to students who wish to develop their career working within or in collaboration with applied research settings.The aim of this project is to investigate, characterise and model how people explore complex environments, both on their own and also when they work as part of a team. We will use a foraging task in which participants are placed in a virtual environment and asked to collect as many targets as they can. The starting point for the project will be the recent Clarke et al. (2022) model of the visual foraging paradigm and during the project, we will integrate the methodology from this study with the social exploration experimental results.The project will aim to ask three main questions. These questions cover a range of different spatial exploration scenarios, thus offering a thorough characterisation of human behaviour in this task in a way that will be highly relevant for human-agent teams in the military context, where teamwork, the presence of threats and the use of 'Heads Up Displays' (HUDs) as navigational aids are all common.1) How does behaviour in a virtual foraging task change when participants are completing the task collaboratively or competitively? 2) How is behaviour affected by the presence of an out-group "threat"? 3) How is behaviour affected by the use of navigational aids?