The effect of target scarcity on visual foraging

Hughes, A. E., Statham, H. R. and Clarke, A. D. F. 2024. The effect of target scarcity on visual foraging. Royal Society Open Science 11 (12) , 240060. 10.1098/rsos.240060

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Abstract

Previous studies have investigated the effect of target prevalence in combination with the effect of explicit target value on human visual foraging strategies, though the conclusions have been mixed. Some find that individuals have a bias towards high-value targets even when these targets are scarcer, while other studies find that this bias disappears when those targets are scarcer. In this study, we tested for a bias for scarce targets using standard feature versus conjunction visual foraging tasks, without an explicit value being given. Based on the idea of commodity theory and implicit value, we hypothesized that participants would show a scarcity bias. The bias was investigated using a Bayesian statistical model which has been developed for predicting target-by-target foraging behaviours. However, we found no evidence of a scarcity bias in our experiment, suggesting that participants did not inherently find rarer targets more rewarding.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology
Additional Information:	License information from Publisher: LICENSE 1: URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, Type: open-access
Publisher:	The Royal Society
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	4 December 2024
Date of Acceptance:	1 October 2024
Last Modified:	04 Dec 2024 10:15
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/174483

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