Link to bioRxiv paper: http://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.08.06.239269v1?rss=1 Authors: Campos, D., Bartumeus, F., Palmer, J. R. B., Mendez, V., Cristin, J. Abstract: There is a widespread belief that the capacity of animals to orchestrate systematic/planned paths must provide a significant benefit for efficient search and exploration, so stochasticity typical of real trajectories is mostly understood as undesirable noise caused by internal or external effects. Far less is known, however, about the role that cognitive errors and limitations inherent to living systems play on such context. Here we compare the search efficiency of (i) walkers driven by Bayesian rules generating deterministic paths, (ii) standard random walkers, and (iii) human trajectories obtained from search experiments in a soccer field and on the computer screen. Our results challenge the view that deterministic paths are generally better for exploration than random strategies, as the latter are more resilient to cognitive errors. Instead, we provide numerical and experimental evidence that stochasticity would provide living organisms with a sufficient and cognitively simple exploration solution for situations of uncertainty. Copy rights belong to original authors. Visit the link for more info