Rationalizing spatial exploration patterns of wild animals and humans through a temporal discounting framework.

ABSTRACT: Understanding the exploration patterns of foragers in the wild provides fundamental insight into animal behavior. Recent experimental evidence has demonstrated that path lengths (distances between consecutive turns) taken by foragers are well fitted by a power law distribution. Numerous theoretical contributions have posited that "Lévy random walks"-which can produce power law path length distributions-are optimal for memoryless agents searching a sparse reward landscape. It is unclear, however, whether such a strategy is efficient for cognitively complex agents, from wild animals to humans. Here, we developed a model to explain the emergence of apparent power law path length distributions in animals that can learn about their environments. In our model, the agent's goal during search is t

SUBMITTER: Namboodiri VM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4978240 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature