School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol, 24 Tyndall Avenue, Bristol, BS8 1TQ, UK.
Department of Psychology and Logopedics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, PL 21 (Haartmaninkatu 3), 00014, Helsinki, Finland.
Biol Rev Camb Philos Soc. 2024 Apr;99(2):478-495. doi: 10.1111/brv.13031. Epub 2023 Nov 21.
Foraging is risk sensitive if choices depend on the variability of returns from the options as well as their mean return. Risk-sensitive foraging is important in behavioural ecology, psychology and neurophysiology. It has been explained both in terms of mechanisms and in terms of evolutionary advantage. We provide a critical review, evaluating both mechanistic and evolutionary accounts. Some derivations of risk sensitivity from mechanistic models based on psychophysics are not convincing because they depend on an inappropriate use of Jensen's inequality. Attempts have been made to link risk sensitivity to the ecology of a species, but again these are not convincing. The field of risk-sensitive foraging has provided a focus for theoretical and empirical work and has yielded important insights, but we lack a simple and empirically defendable general account of it in either mechanistic or evolutionary terms. However, empirical analysis of choice sequences under theoretically motivated experimental designs and environmental settings appears a promising avenue for mapping the scope and relative merits of existing theories. Simply put, the devil is in the sequence.
如果选择取决于选项回报的可变性及其均值回报，那么觅食就是风险敏感的。风险敏感觅食在行为生态学、心理学和神经生理学中很重要。它既可以从机制上解释，也可以从进化优势上解释。我们提供了一个批判性的综述，评估了机制和进化的解释。一些基于心理物理学的机制模型从风险敏感性的推导并不令人信服，因为它们依赖于对 Jensen 不等式的不当使用。人们试图将风险敏感性与物种的生态学联系起来，但这些尝试也同样不可信。风险敏感觅食领域为理论和实证工作提供了一个焦点，并产生了重要的见解，但我们缺乏一个简单的、可在机制或进化方面得到经验支持的通用解释。然而，在理论上有动机的实验设计和环境设置下对选择序列进行的实证分析，似乎是映射现有理论的范围和相对优势的一个有前途的途径。简单地说，魔鬼在细节中。
