The effect of target scarcity on visual foraging

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.

Keywords

• foraging
• visual search
• cognitive modelling