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Mere presence of co-eater automatically shifts foraging tactics toward ‘Fast and Easy' food in humans
Competition for food resources is widespread in nature. The foraging behaviour of social animals should thus be adapted to potential food competition. We conjectured that in the presence of co-foragers, animals would shift their tactics to forage more frequently for smaller food. Because smaller foo...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
The Royal Society
2020
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7211848/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32431897 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.200044 |
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author | Ogura, Yukiko Masamoto, Taku Kameda, Tatsuya |
author_facet | Ogura, Yukiko Masamoto, Taku Kameda, Tatsuya |
author_sort | Ogura, Yukiko |
collection | PubMed |
description | Competition for food resources is widespread in nature. The foraging behaviour of social animals should thus be adapted to potential food competition. We conjectured that in the presence of co-foragers, animals would shift their tactics to forage more frequently for smaller food. Because smaller foods are more abundant in nature and allow faster consumption, such tactics should allow animals to consume food more securely against scrounging. We experimentally tested whether such a shift would be triggered automatically in human eating behaviour, even when there was no rivalry about food consumption. To prevent subjects from having rivalry, they were instructed to engage in a ‘taste test' in a laboratory, alone or in pairs. Even though the other subject was merely present and there was no real competition for food, subjects in pairs immediately exhibited a systematic behavioural shift to reaching for smaller food amounts more frequently, which was clearly distinct from their reaching patterns both when eating alone and when simply weighing the same food without eating any. These patterns suggest that behavioural shifts in the presence of others may be built-in tactics in humans (and possibly in other gregarious animals as well) to adapt to potential food competition in social foraging. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7211848 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | The Royal Society |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-72118482020-05-19 Mere presence of co-eater automatically shifts foraging tactics toward ‘Fast and Easy' food in humans Ogura, Yukiko Masamoto, Taku Kameda, Tatsuya R Soc Open Sci Organismal and Evolutionary Biology Competition for food resources is widespread in nature. The foraging behaviour of social animals should thus be adapted to potential food competition. We conjectured that in the presence of co-foragers, animals would shift their tactics to forage more frequently for smaller food. Because smaller foods are more abundant in nature and allow faster consumption, such tactics should allow animals to consume food more securely against scrounging. We experimentally tested whether such a shift would be triggered automatically in human eating behaviour, even when there was no rivalry about food consumption. To prevent subjects from having rivalry, they were instructed to engage in a ‘taste test' in a laboratory, alone or in pairs. Even though the other subject was merely present and there was no real competition for food, subjects in pairs immediately exhibited a systematic behavioural shift to reaching for smaller food amounts more frequently, which was clearly distinct from their reaching patterns both when eating alone and when simply weighing the same food without eating any. These patterns suggest that behavioural shifts in the presence of others may be built-in tactics in humans (and possibly in other gregarious animals as well) to adapt to potential food competition in social foraging. The Royal Society 2020-04-01 /pmc/articles/PMC7211848/ /pubmed/32431897 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.200044 Text en © 2020 The Authors. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Organismal and Evolutionary Biology Ogura, Yukiko Masamoto, Taku Kameda, Tatsuya Mere presence of co-eater automatically shifts foraging tactics toward ‘Fast and Easy' food in humans |
title | Mere presence of co-eater automatically shifts foraging tactics toward ‘Fast and Easy' food in humans |
title_full | Mere presence of co-eater automatically shifts foraging tactics toward ‘Fast and Easy' food in humans |
title_fullStr | Mere presence of co-eater automatically shifts foraging tactics toward ‘Fast and Easy' food in humans |
title_full_unstemmed | Mere presence of co-eater automatically shifts foraging tactics toward ‘Fast and Easy' food in humans |
title_short | Mere presence of co-eater automatically shifts foraging tactics toward ‘Fast and Easy' food in humans |
title_sort | mere presence of co-eater automatically shifts foraging tactics toward ‘fast and easy' food in humans |
topic | Organismal and Evolutionary Biology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7211848/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32431897 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.200044 |
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