Too many eyes on the same prize? Why searching together but dividing attention shapes more effective collective foraging.

Journal of Comparative Psychology, Vol 140(3), Aug 2026, 167-168; doi:10.1037/com0000453

Comments on an article by K. Ighalo & N. Miller (see record 2027-04636-001). In the context of numerous foragers in an environment, the story becomes more complicated. Now, many foragers searching for one cryptic prey type means less of those prey and a greater relative prevalence of other prey that may then be easier to identify by other foragers. As this process plays out and some foragers focus attention on some prey types because those are the ones they first encounter, other foragers then focus on other prey types because they are more prevalent as a result. This can lead to a reduction in competition among the foragers. The article by Ighalo and Miller is about exactly that kind of situation in which individual foragers engage in “attentional character displacement.” Ighalo and Miller’s model was based on a simplified version of Guided Visual Search, which proposes that individuals engage visual scenes by first processing basic features (such as color and size) across the entire field in parallel. These features are combined with the individual’s goals to create a priority map that guides attention toward likely target locations. Ighalo and Miller predicted that attentional character displacement would reduce competition and improve success rates in their group of simulated foragers, and that each individual forager would experience this effect whether those foragers were able to modulate attention or not. They also predicted that this outcome would be modulated by other effects such as group size, the number of prey types available, and how cryptic the prey were. When the simulation included only two types of prey, Ighalo and Miller found that smaller groups foraged more successfully than larger groups, but it also was true that a higher proportion of attention-modulating foragers led to higher success rates across group sizes. What can be concluded is that a cognitive-ecological modeling approach such as that used by Ighalo and Miller shows that competition likely leads to the evolution of search images. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)

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