Frequency-dependent payoffs and sequential decision-making favour consistent tactic use

Although natural selection should have favoured individuals capable of adjusting the weight they give to personal and social information according to circumstances, individuals generally differ consistently in their individual weighting of both types of information. Such individual differences are correlated with personality traits, suggesting that personality could directly affect individuals’ ability to collect personal or social information. Alternatively, the link between personality and information use could simply emerge as a by-product of the sequential decision-making process in a frequency-dependent context. Indeed, when the gains associated with behavioural options depend on the choices of others, an individual's sequence of arrival could constrain its choice of options leading to the emergence of correlated behaviours. Any factor such as personality that affects decision order could thus be correlated with information use. To test this new explanation, we developed an individual-based model that simulates a group of animals engaged in a game of sequential frequency-dependent decision: a producer–scrounger game. Our results confirm that the sequence of decision, in this case enforced by the order in which animals enter a foraging area, consistently influences their mean tactic use and their individual plasticity, an outcome reminiscent of the correlation reported between personality and social information use.

An Experiment to Identify the Structural Dynamics of a Portal Frame

This paper describes the application of sequential frequency domain techniques to the estimation of mass, stiffness, and damping parameters using measured frequency response functions from a portal frame rig. The theory of the method has been described in the authors’ previous publications. A portal frame is representative of many engineering structures. It is lightly damped and may be thought of as an element of several larger structures such as bridges, transmission towers, and the steel foundations of modern power generating plant. The results offered in this paper are thus of interest to a broad range of engineering problems where it is required to obtain mathematical models in terms of physical parameters.