When to move on to the next raspberry bush.

A mathematical model on multi-target cognitive search optimization.

Abstract

Animals, including humans, engage in many forms of foraging behavior in which resources are collected from the world. This project 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. This project aims to determine the optimum time to leave a bush for a new one, which in turn will optimize the yield.

References

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