When is it time to move to the next raspberry bush? Foraging rules in human visual search

作者：Wolfe Jeremy M^*

来源：Journal of Vision, 2013, 13(3): 10.

DOI：10.1167/13.3.10

• visual search
• foraging
• marginal value theorem
• visual attention
• decision rules

Animals, including humans, engage in many forms of foraging behavior in which resources are collected from the world. This paper examines human foraging in a visual search context. A real-world analog would be berry picking. The selection of individual berries is not the most interesting problem in such a task. Of more interest is when does a forager leave one patch or berry bush for the next one? Marginal Value Theorem (MVT; Charnov, 1976) predicts that observers will leave a patch when the instantaneous yield from that patch drops below the average yield from the entire "field.'' Experiments 1, 2, 3, and 4 show that MVT gives a good description of human behavior for roughly uniform collections of patches. Experiments 5 and 6 show strong departures from MVT when patch quality varies and when visual information is degraded.

• 出版日期2013