Dominik Deffner
Photo: SCIoI
Dominik is an evolutionary and computational behavioral scientist with a background in Psychology and Anthropology. His research broadly focuses on the individual-level learning processes and population-level social dynamics underlying human collective intelligence and adaptation. He mostly uses behavioral group experiments, computational and statistical modeling as well as formal mathematical theory. After a Master’s at the University of St. Andrews and a PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, he now studies how human (and robotic) groups collectively balance individual and social information use (Project 34).
Projects
Dominik Deffner is member of Project 34.
Publications +
Pacher, K., Krause, J., Bartashevich, P., Romanczuk, P., Bideau, P., Pham, D., Burns, A., Deffner, D., Dhellemmes, F., Binder, B., Boswell, K., Galván-Magaña, F., Domenici, P., & Hansen, M. (2024). Evidence for a by-product mutualism in a group hunter depends on prey movement state. Functional Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2435.14638
Mezey, D., Deffner, D., Kurvers, R. H., & Romanczuk, P. (2024). Visual social information use in collective foraging. PLoS Computational Biology, 20, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1012087
Deffner, D., Mezey, D., Kahl, B., Schakowski, A., Romanczuk, P., Wu, C. M., & Kurvers, R. (2024). Collective incentives reduce over-exploitation of social information in unconstrained human groups. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47010-3
Breen, A., & Deffner, D. (2024). Risk-sensitive learning is a winning strategy for leading an urban invasion. Elife. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.89315.3
Wu, C., Deffner, D., Kahl, B., Meder, B., Ho, M., & Kurvers, R. (2024). Visual-spatial dynamics drive adaptive social learning in immersive environments. bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.06.28.546887
Tump, A., Deffner, D., Pleskac, T., Romanczuk, P., & Kurvers, R. (2023). A cognitive computational approach to social and collective decision-making. Perspectives on Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916231186964
Deffner, D., Kandler, A., & Fogarty, L. (2022). Effective population size for culturally evolving traits. Plos Computational Biology. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009430
Deffner, D., & McElreath, R. (2022). When does selection favor learning from the old? Social learning in age-structured populations. Plos One. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267204
