TY  - JOUR
AU  - Green, Matthew
AU  - Segen, Vladislava
AU  - Korstjens, Amanda
AU  - Meso, Andrew Isaac
AU  - Thomas, Tessa
AU  - Wiener, Jan M
TI  - Foraging with your eyes: a novel task to study cognitive strategies involved in (visual) foraging behaviour.
JO  - Cognitive processing
VL  - 26
IS  - 3
SN  - 1612-4782
CY  - Berlin
PB  - Springer
M1  - DZNE-2025-00946
SP  - 541 - 554
PY  - 2025
AB  - In this study we introduce a new gaze-contingent visual foraging task in which participants searched through an environment by looking at trees displayed on a computer screen. If the looked-at tree contained a fruit item, the item became visible and was collected. In each trial, the participant's task was to forage for a defined number of fruit items. In two experiments, fruit items were either randomly distributed about the trees (dispersed condition) or organised in one large patch (patchy condition). In the second experiment, we addressed the role of memory for foraging by including a condition that did not require memorising which trees had already been visited by changing their appearance (tree fading). Foraging performance was superior in the patchy as compared to the dispersed condition and benefited from tree-fading. In addition, with further analyses on search behaviour, these results suggest (1) that participants were sensitive to the distribution of resources, (2) that they adapted their search/foraging strategy accordingly, and (3) that foraging behaviour is in line with predictions derived from foraging theories, specifically area-restricted search, developed for large scale spatial foraging. We therefore argue that the visual search task presented shares characteristics and cognitive mechanisms involved in successful large-scale search and foraging behaviour and can therefore be successfully employed to study these mechanisms.
KW  - Humans
KW  - Male
KW  - Female
KW  - Young Adult
KW  - Adult
KW  - Visual Perception: physiology
KW  - Cognition: physiology
KW  - Attention: physiology
KW  - Photic Stimulation
KW  - Eye-tracking (Other)
KW  - Foraging (Other)
KW  - Resource distribution (Other)
KW  - Search (Other)
KW  - Visual search (Other)
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
C6  - pmid:39982677
DO  - DOI:10.1007/s10339-025-01261-0
UR  - https://pub.dzne.de/record/280291
ER  -