Wolfe Jeremy M
Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, MA, USA.
J Vis. 2013 Jan 1;13(3):10. doi: 10.1167/13.3.10.
Animals, including humans, engage in many forms of foraging behavior in which resources are collected from the world. This paper examines human foraging in a visual search context. A real-world analog would be berry picking. The selection of individual berries is not the most interesting problem in such a task. Of more interest is when does a forager leave one patch or berry bush for the next one? Marginal Value Theorem (MVT; Charnov, 1976) predicts that observers will leave a patch when the instantaneous yield from that patch drops below the average yield from the entire "field." Experiments 1, 2, 3, and 4 show that MVT gives a good description of human behavior for roughly uniform collections of patches. Experiments 5 and 6 show strong departures from MVT when patch quality varies and when visual information is degraded.
包括人类在内的动物会进行多种形式的觅食行为，即从外界获取资源。本文研究视觉搜索情境下的人类觅食行为。现实世界中的类似行为是采摘浆果。在这样的任务中，挑选单个浆果并非最有趣的问题。更有趣的是，觅食者何时会离开一片区域或一丛浆果去寻找下一片？边际价值定理（MVT；查诺夫，1976）预测，当某片区域的即时产量降至整个“区域”的平均产量以下时，观察者就会离开这片区域。实验1、2、3和4表明，对于大致均匀的区域集合，MVT能很好地描述人类行为。实验5和6表明，当区域质量不同以及视觉信息退化时，人类行为会与MVT有很大偏差。
