Differential patch-leaving behavior during probabilistic foraging in humans and gerbils.
Commun Biol
; 7(1): 1000, 2024 Aug 15.
Article
en En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-39147833
ABSTRACT
Foraging confronts animals, including humans, with the need to balance exploration and exploitation exploiting a resource until it depletes and then deciding when to move to a new location for more resources. Research across various species has identified rules for when to leave a depleting patch, influenced by environmental factors like patch quality. Here we compare human and gerbil patch-leaving behavior through two analogous tasks a visual search for humans and a physical foraging task for gerbils, both involving patches with randomly varying initial rewards that decreased exponentially. Patch-leaving decisions of humans but not gerbils follow an incremental mechanism based on reward encounters that is considered optimal for maximizing reward yields in variable foraging environments. The two species also differ in their giving-up times, and some human subjects tend to overharvest. However, gerbils and individual humans who do not overharvest are equally sensitive to declining collection rates in accordance with the marginal value theorem. Altogether this study introduces a paradigm for a between-species comparison on how to resolve the exploitation-exploration dilemma.
Texto completo:
1
Colección:
01-internacional
Base de datos:
MEDLINE
Asunto principal:
Gerbillinae
Límite:
Animals
/
Female
/
Humans
/
Male
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Commun Biol
Año:
2024
Tipo del documento:
Article
País de afiliación:
Alemania
Pais de publicación:
Reino Unido