Visual Attention Lab, Brigham and Women's Hospital, USA; Harvard Medical School, USA.
Morgantown High School, USA.
Vision Res. 2024 Nov;224:108491. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2024.108491. Epub 2024 Sep 27.
In visual foraging, foragers collect multiple items from a series of visual displays (or "patches"). When the goal is to maximize the total or the rate of collection of target items, foragers must decide when to leave a depleted patch given that "traveling" from one patch to another incurs a temporal cost. In three experiments, we investigated whether the interposition of a secondary task during travel between patches in visual foraging altered patch-leaving behavior. Over the course of 10- or 30-minute experiments, participants foraged in simulated "berry patches" and traveled to the next patch at will. While they traveled, they either actively performed a secondary task or simply observed passing visual stimuli. Travel time was varied across conditions. The addition of a secondary task, regardless of its relevance to visual foraging, to traveling, or to both, did not impact patch-leaving times in the primary visual foraging task. In Experiment 1 and more weakly in Experiment 2, the patch-leaving decision was based on how long the travel took as predicted by the Marginal Value Theorem (MVT). In Experiment 3, however, patch-leaving did not depend on travel time. Participants 'overharvested' in a manner that suggests that they may have adopted rules different from those of MVT. Across all three experiments, patch-leaving did not depend on the nature of the travel.
在视觉觅食中，觅食者从一系列视觉显示（或“斑块”）中收集多个项目。当目标是最大化目标项目的总收集量或收集速度时，觅食者必须决定何时离开一个消耗殆尽的斑块，因为从一个斑块“旅行”到另一个斑块会产生时间成本。在三个实验中，我们研究了在视觉觅食中斑块之间的旅行过程中插入次要任务是否会改变斑块离开行为。在 10 或 30 分钟的实验过程中，参与者在模拟的“浆果斑块”中觅食，并随意前往下一个斑块。当他们旅行时，他们要么主动执行次要任务，要么只是观察经过的视觉刺激。旅行时间在不同条件下有所不同。无论次要任务与视觉觅食、旅行或两者都相关，添加次要任务都不会影响主要视觉觅食任务中的斑块离开时间。在实验 1 中，更弱地在实验 2 中，斑块离开决策是基于旅行时间的长短，如边际价值定理（MVT）所预测的那样。然而，在实验 3 中，斑块离开时间不取决于旅行时间。参与者“过度收获”，这表明他们可能采用了不同于 MVT 的规则。在所有三个实验中，斑块离开时间都不取决于旅行的性质。
