High-precision tracking of human foragers reveals adaptive social information use in the wild

Foraging complexity and competitive social challenges are considered key drivers of human cognition. Yet, the decision-making mechanisms that underlie social foraging in the real world remain unknown. Integrating high-precision Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking and video footage from large-scale foraging competitions with cognitive-computational modeling and agent-based simulations, we show how foragers integrate personal, social, and ecological information to guide spatial search and patch-leaving decisions. We show how the social context emerges as a key driver of foraging dynamics. Foragers adaptively rely on social information to locate resources when unsuccessful and extend giving-up times in the presence of others, which results in increased area-restricted search at high social densities. These findings demonstrate the importance of sociality for human foraging decisions and provide a template for harnessing high-resolution tracking data to study real-world cognition.