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Overharvesting in human patch foraging reflects rational structure learning and adaptive planning

Patch foraging presents a sequential decision-making problem widely studied across organisms—stay with a current option or leave it in search of a better alternative? Behavioral ecology has identified an optimal strategy for these decisions, but, across species, foragers systematically deviate from...

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Autores principales: Harhen, Nora C., Bornstein, Aaron M.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: National Academy of Sciences 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10068834/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36961923
http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2216524120
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author Harhen, Nora C.
Bornstein, Aaron M.
author_facet Harhen, Nora C.
Bornstein, Aaron M.
author_sort Harhen, Nora C.
collection PubMed
description Patch foraging presents a sequential decision-making problem widely studied across organisms—stay with a current option or leave it in search of a better alternative? Behavioral ecology has identified an optimal strategy for these decisions, but, across species, foragers systematically deviate from it, staying too long with an option or “overharvesting” relative to this optimum. Despite the ubiquity of this behavior, the mechanism underlying it remains unclear and an object of extensive investigation. Here, we address this gap by approaching foraging as both a decision-making and learning problem. Specifically, we propose a model in which foragers 1) rationally infer the structure of their environment and 2) use their uncertainty over the inferred structure representation to adaptively discount future rewards. We find that overharvesting can emerge from this rational statistical inference and uncertainty adaptation process. In a patch-leaving task, we show that human participants adapt their foraging to the richness and dynamics of the environment in ways consistent with our model. These findings suggest that definitions of optimal foraging could be extended by considering how foragers reduce and adapt to uncertainty over representations of their environment.
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spelling pubmed-100688342023-09-24 Overharvesting in human patch foraging reflects rational structure learning and adaptive planning Harhen, Nora C. Bornstein, Aaron M. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A Social Sciences Patch foraging presents a sequential decision-making problem widely studied across organisms—stay with a current option or leave it in search of a better alternative? Behavioral ecology has identified an optimal strategy for these decisions, but, across species, foragers systematically deviate from it, staying too long with an option or “overharvesting” relative to this optimum. Despite the ubiquity of this behavior, the mechanism underlying it remains unclear and an object of extensive investigation. Here, we address this gap by approaching foraging as both a decision-making and learning problem. Specifically, we propose a model in which foragers 1) rationally infer the structure of their environment and 2) use their uncertainty over the inferred structure representation to adaptively discount future rewards. We find that overharvesting can emerge from this rational statistical inference and uncertainty adaptation process. In a patch-leaving task, we show that human participants adapt their foraging to the richness and dynamics of the environment in ways consistent with our model. These findings suggest that definitions of optimal foraging could be extended by considering how foragers reduce and adapt to uncertainty over representations of their environment. National Academy of Sciences 2023-03-24 2023-03-28 /pmc/articles/PMC10068834/ /pubmed/36961923 http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2216524120 Text en Copyright © 2023 the Author(s). Published by PNAS. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/This article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Social Sciences
Harhen, Nora C.
Bornstein, Aaron M.
Overharvesting in human patch foraging reflects rational structure learning and adaptive planning
title Overharvesting in human patch foraging reflects rational structure learning and adaptive planning
title_full Overharvesting in human patch foraging reflects rational structure learning and adaptive planning
title_fullStr Overharvesting in human patch foraging reflects rational structure learning and adaptive planning
title_full_unstemmed Overharvesting in human patch foraging reflects rational structure learning and adaptive planning
title_short Overharvesting in human patch foraging reflects rational structure learning and adaptive planning
title_sort overharvesting in human patch foraging reflects rational structure learning and adaptive planning
topic Social Sciences
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10068834/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36961923
http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2216524120
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