# L'evy flights in human behavior and cognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.6533 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.6533/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jun 2013.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [ETGL-DDPG: A Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient Algorithm for Sparse Reward Continuous Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05225/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

L'evy flights represent the best strategy to randomly search for a target in an unknown environment, and have been widely observed in many animal species. Here, we inspect and discuss recent results concerning human behavior and cognition. Different studies have shown that human mobility can be described in terms of L'evy flights, while fresh evidence indicates that the same pattern accounts for human mental searches in online gambling sites. Thus, L'evy flights emerge as a unifying concept with broad cross-disciplinary implications. We argue that the ubiquity of such a pattern, both in behavior and cognition, suggests that the brain regions responsible for this behavior are likely to be evolutionarily old (i.e. no frontal cortex is involved), and that fMRI techniques might help to confirm this hypothesis.