Title: Optimised information gathering in smartphone users,
Abstract: Human activities from hunting to emailing are performed in a fractal-like
scale invariant pattern. These patterns are considered efficient for hunting or
foraging, but are they efficient for gathering information? Here we link the
scale invariant pattern of inter-touch intervals on the smartphone to optimal
strategies for information gathering. We recorded touchscreen touches in 65
individuals for a month and categorized the activity into checking for
information vs. sharing content. For both categories, the inter-touch intervals
were well described by power-law fits spanning 5 orders of magnitude, from 1 s
to several hours. The power-law exponent typically found for checking was 1.5
and for generating it was 1.3. Next, by using computer simulations we addressed
whether the checking pattern was efficient - in terms of minimizing futile
attempts yielding no new information. We find that the best performing power
law exponent depends on the duration of the assessment and the exponent of 1.5
was the most efficient in the short-term i.e. in the few minutes range.
Finally, we addressed whether how people generated and shared content was in
tune with the checking pattern. We assumed that the unchecked posts must be
minimized for maximal efficiency and according to our analysis the most
efficient temporal pattern to share content was the exponent of 1.3 - which was
also the pattern displayed by the smartphone users. The behavioral organization
for content generation is different from content consumption across time
scales. We propose that this difference is a signature of optimal behavior and
the short-term assessments used in modern human actions.