Socioecology drives adaptive social foraging dynamics in the wild

Foraging complexity and competitive social challenges are considered key drivers of human cognition. Yet, the decision-making mechanisms underlying social foraging in the real world remain unknown. Integrating high-precision GPS tracking and video footage from large-scale foraging competitions with cognitive-computational modeling and agent-based simulations, we show how foragers integrate socioecological information streams to guide spatial search and patch-leaving decisions. Contrasting earlier work, 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, resulting 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.