Human foraging strategies flexibly adapt to resource distribution and time constraints

Foraging is a crucial activity, yet the extent to which humans employflexible versus rigid strategies remains unclear. This study investigates howindividuals adapt their foraging strategies in response to resourcedistribution and foraging time constraints. For this, we designed avideo-game-like foraging task that requires participants to navigate afour-areas environment to collect coins from treasure boxes within a limitedtime. This task engages multiple cognitive abilities, such as navigation,learning, and memorization of treasure box locations. Findings indicate thatparticipants adjust their foraging strategies -- encompassing bothstay-or-leave decisions, such as the number of boxes opened in initial areasand behavioral aspects, such as the time to navigate from box to box --depending on both resource distribution and foraging time. Additionally, theyimproved their performance over time as an effect of both enhanced navigationskills and adaptation of foraging strategies. Finally, participants'performance was initially distant from the reward-maximizing performance ofoptimal agents due to the learning process humans undergo; however, itapproximated the optimal agent's performance towards the end of the task,without fully reaching it. These results highlight the flexibility of humanforaging behavior and underscore the importance of employing optimality modelsand ecologically rich scenarios to study foraging.