Wataru Toyokawa, PhD

Unit Leader

Computational Group Dynamics (COGNAC) Collaboration Unit at RIKEN CBS, Tokyo

E-mail: wataru.toyokawa[at]riken.jp     

Twitter: @WataruToyokawa     Google Scholar: [link]       ResearchGate: [link] Publons:[link]     GitHub:[link]     Full CV: [pdf]

Research interests:

His research focuses on the computational underpinnings and eco-evolutionary implications of human social learning and their relationships with group decision-making and collective behaviour. Using computational modelling and Bayesian statistical methods, coupled with online realtime behavioural experimentation, he is quantitatively approaching human social behaviour and group dynamics. He also uses mathematical models to study population dynamics and evolutionary games. 

Background:

He is a Unit Leader (a sort of junior group leader) at the Computational Group Dynamics (COGNAC) Unit at RIKEN CBS, Tokyo. He obtained his PhD and MSc in Behavioural Science (2015 and 2012), and a BSc in Fisheries Science (2010) from Hokkaido University, Hakodate, Japan. He moved to the University of St Andrews, Scotland as the JSPS Overseas Research Fellow (2015-2017). Then he obtained a JSPS Research Fellowship (PD; 2017-2019) jointly working  at both the University of St Andrews and the Graduate University of Advanced Studies (a.k.a. 'SOKENDAI'), Hayama, Japan, followed by joining the University of Konstanz in 2019, as a research scientist/Project PI at the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour.

Selected Publications

A desire to conform to the group may help people make better decisions by encouraging them to gather information from others that mitigates their individual biases.

Toyokawa W, Gaissmaier W. (2022). Conformist social learning leads to self-organised prevention against adverse bias in risky decision making. eLife. 11:e75308. (doi: 10.7554/eLife.75308)

Collective intelligence versus inflexible herding can be predicted on the basis of the task and the social learning strategies used.

Toyokawa W, Whalen A and Laland KN. (2019). Social learning strategies regulate the wisdom and madness of interactive crowds. Nature Human Behaviour 3(2):183-193. (doi: 10.1038/s41562-018-0518-x)

Sharing 5-star ratings weakened human collective intelligence in a gambling task

Toyokawa W, Kim H and Kameda T. (2014). Human collective intelligence under dual exploration-exploitation dilemmas. PLoS ONE 9(4): e95789. (doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0095789)

Asocial explorative tendency did not correlated with social information use in humans

Toyokawa W, Saito Y and Kameda T. (2017). Individual differences in learning behaviours in humans: Asocial exploration tendency does not predict reliance on social learning. Evolution and Human Behavior, 38 (3): 325-333. (doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2016.11.001)

Social foraging by predator can stabilise a potentially fluctuating biological community

Toyokawa W. (2017). Scrounging by foragers can resolve the paradox of enrichment. Royal Society Open Science, 4: 160830. (doi:10.1098/rsos.160830)

C.V.

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