Overharvesting in human patch foraging reflects rational structure learning and adaptive planning.

ABSTRACT: Patch foraging presents a sequential decision-making problem widely studied across organisms-stay with a current option or leave it in search of a better alternative? Behavioral ecology has identified an optimal strategy for these decisions, but, across species, foragers systematically deviate from it, staying too long with an option or "overharvesting" relative to this optimum. Despite the ubiquity of this behavior, the mechanism underlying it remains unclear and an object of extensive investigation. Here, we address this gap by approaching foraging as both a decision-making and learning problem. Specifically, we propose a model in which foragers 1) rationally infer the structure of their environment and 2) use their uncertainty over the inferred structure representation to adaptively dis

SUBMITTER: Harhen NC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10068834 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature