Humans and other primates on the hunt for hidden rewards must search for them persistently, by thoroughly inspecting the objects in their environment. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

įunding: This work was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health under Award Numbers R01MH110594 and R01MH116937, by the McKnight Memory and Cognitive Disorders Award to IEM, and by the Army Research Office 78259-NS-MUR. We have also used Zenodo to assign a DOI to the repository. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All data and code used for running experiments, model fitting, and plotting is available on a GitHub repository at. Received: MaAccepted: NovemPublished: December 14, 2021Ĭopyright: © 2021 Traner et al.

PLoS Comput Biol 17(12):Įditor: Alireza Soltani, Dartmouth College, UNITED STATES A novel computational model of foraging suggests that this search strategy could be adaptive in naturalistic settings where both environments and the objects within them provide partial information about hidden, uncertain rewards.Ĭitation: Traner MR, Bromberg-Martin ES, Monosov IE (2021) How the value of the environment controls persistence in visual search. We found that the reward-related bias scaled with environment value, was consistent with persistent searching after the target was already found, and was associated with increased exploratory gaze to objects in the environment. We trained monkeys to search for reward-related visual targets in environments with different values. Here we present evidence this behavior is associated with a complementary increased motivation to search the environment for alternatives. This reward-related bias is often explained as reduced motivation in response to low rewards. However, in standard instrumental conditioning tasks individuals adopt an apparently suboptimal strategy: they respond slowly when the expected value is low.

Classic foraging theory predicts that humans and animals aim to gain maximum reward per unit time.

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