Department of Experimental Psychology, Institute of Psychology, Otto-von-Guericke-University, 39106, Magdeburg, Germany.
Department of Systems Physiology of Learning, Leibniz-Institute for Neurobiology, 39118, Magdeburg, Germany.
Commun Biol. 2024 Aug 15;7(1):1000. doi: 10.1038/s42003-024-06683-8.
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.
在资源枯竭后，开发新的资源点。在各种物种中进行的研究已经确定了离开正在减少的斑块的规则，这些规则受到斑块质量等环境因素的影响。在这里，我们通过两个类似的任务来比较人类和沙鼠的斑块离开行为：人类的视觉搜索和沙鼠的物理觅食任务，两者都涉及初始奖励随机变化、呈指数下降的斑块。人类的斑块离开决策遵循基于奖励遭遇的增量机制，这被认为是在可变觅食环境中最大化奖励收益的最佳机制。这两个物种在放弃时间上也存在差异，一些人类受试者倾向于过度收获。然而，根据边际价值定理，不过度收获的沙鼠和个别人类对下降的采集率同样敏感。总的来说，这项研究引入了一种物种间比较的范例，探讨如何解决开发和探索的困境。
