AI RESEARCH
The Yerkes-Dodson Curve for AI Agents: Emergent Cooperation Under Environmental Pressure in Multi-Agent LLM Simulations
arXiv CS.AI
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ArXi:2603.07360v1 Announce Type: new Designing environments that maximize the rate of emergent behavior development in AI agents remains an open problem. We present the first systematic study of stress-performance relationships in large language model (LLM) multi-agent systems, drawing an explicit parallel to the Yerkes-Dodson law from cognitive psychology. Using a grid-world survival arena, we conduct 22 experiments across four phases, varying environmental pressure through resource scarcity (upkeep cost) and reproductive competition (sexual selection.