I am a postdoctoral researcher at CalTech in the Fear Lab. I received my PhD in Cognitive Sciences from UC Merced, in 2022. Before pursuing my PhD, I got a BS-MS degree in biological sciences from IISER, Mohali.
My research interests cut across disciplines and span the themes of behavioral ecology, collective behavior, cultural evolution and complex systems. At the core of my curiosities is the question of adaptive behavior at multiple scales of organization. How do individuals and groups behave adaptively? What kind of strategies and decisions help them respond to the challenges of their environment? How does adaptive behavior in individuals and groups interact and evolve? I often employ foraging paradigms to answer these questions.
During my PhD, my research addressed fundamental questions about search processes in humans and other animals, and what they can tell us about adaptive behavior. I investigated the different strategies that an individual or a group of individuals can adopt to efficiently search for resources like food or information and how they may adapt their strategies for various environmental (physical and social) and task constraints.
When not coding up models and games, I can be usually found reading books on history, or cooking or planning my next meals.. sometimes both simultaneously.
"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow... On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back.. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery." - Cormac McCarthy, The RoadSearch requires balancing exploring for more options and exploiting the ones previously found. Individuals foraging in a group face another trade-off - whether to engage in social learning to exploit the solutions found by others or to solitarily search for unexplored solutions. Social learning can better exploit learned information and decrease the costs of finding new resources, but excessive social learning can lead to over-exploitation and too little exploration for new solutions. We study how these two trade-offs interact to influence search efficiency in a model of collective foraging under conditions of varying resource abundance, resource density and group size. We modelled individual search strategies as Lévy walks, where a power-law exponent (μ) controlled the trade-off between exploitative and explorative movements in individual search. We modulated the trade-off between individual search and social learning using a selectivity parameter that determined how agents responded to social cues in terms of distance and likely opportunity costs. Our results show that social learning is favoured in rich and clustered environments, but also that the benefits of exploiting social information are maximized by engaging in high levels of individual exploration. We show that selective use of social information can modulate the disadvantages of excessive social learning, especially in larger groups and when individual exploration is limited. Finally, we found that the optimal combination of individual exploration and social learning gave rise to trajectories with μ ≈ 2 and provide support for the general optimality of such patterns in search. Our work sheds light on the interplay between individual search and social learning, and has broader implications for collective search and problem-solving.
Central-place foraging (CPF), where foragers return to a central location (or home), is a key feature of hunter–gatherer social organization. CPF could have significantly changed hunter–gatherers’ spatial use and mobility, altered social networks and increased opportunities for information-exchange. We evaluated whether CPF patterns facilitate information-transmission and considered the potential roles of environmental conditions, mobility strategies and population sizes. We built an agent-based model of CPF where agents moved according to a simple optimal foraging rule, and could encounter other agents as they moved across the environment. They either foraged close to their home within a given radius or moved the location of their home to new areas. We analysed the interaction networks arising under different conditions and found that, at intermediate levels of environmental heterogeneity and mobility, CPF increased global and local network efficiencies as well as the rate of contagion-based information-transmission. We also found that central-place mobility strategies can further improve information transmission in larger populations. Our findings suggest that the combination of foraging and movement strategies, as well as the environmental conditions that characterized early human societies, may have been a crucial precursor in our species’ unique capacity to innovate, accumulate and rely on complex culture.
Efficient foraging depends on decisions that account for the costs and benefits of various activities like movement, perception, and planning. We conducted a virtual foraging experiment set in the foothills of the Himalayas to examine how time and energy are expended to forage efficiently, and how foraging changes when constrained to a home range. Two hundred players foraged the human-scale landscape with simulated energy expenditure in search of naturally distributed resources. Results showed that efficient foragers produced periods of locomotion interleaved with perception and planning that approached theoretical expectations for Lévy walks, regardless of the home-range constraint. Despite this constancy, efficient home-range foraging trajectories were less diffusive by virtue of restricting locomotive search and spending more time instead scanning the environment to plan movement and detect far-away resources. Altogether, results demonstrate that humans can forage efficiently by arranging and adjusting Lévy-distributed search activities in response to environmental and task constraints.