However, in pure patches, the impact of copying on diet energy is generally limited.
This breaks down in pure patches, where copying can become contagious when high-copy preferences overrule individual experience.
In pure patches, there is no clear pattern, although there is a significant increase for C = 0.05.
Moreover, if the ease of copying coincides with ease of learning, this leads to excessive copying, as in pure patches.
We vary foraging opportunities by changing local variation in resources, studying copying in environments with pure patches, varied patches, and uniform distributed resources.
We compare learning in environments with pure patches, varied patches, and uniform environments, and so study the impact of resource distributions on the role of copying.
For patchy environments, each patch is either assigned a single resource type (pure patches), giving 250 patch types, or assigned a subset of five resources (varied patches), giving 50 patch types.
In pure patches, this is because familiarity biases are already highly converged on high-quality resources without copying because learning is easy (see Fig. 4a).
This is why, when preference learning is easy and individuals quickly become sufficiently selective, as in pure patches, copying can become excessive.
However, in pure patches, this mediation can break down because the local abundance of a single low-quality resource can generate contagious copying following a single unselective decision.
