ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Rationalizing spatial exploration patterns of wild animals and humans through a temporal discounting framework.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Executive functioning in wild guppies: investigating the impact of a pharmaceutical pollutant.Animal cognition · 2026Article
- Differences in time perception in patients with obstructive sleep apnea.Neurological sciences : official journal of the Italian Neurological Society and of the Italian Society of Clinical Neurophysiology · 2025Article
- A framework for uniting space and time in the mind and brain.Frontiers in cognition · 2025Article
- Individual exploration and selective social learning: balancing exploration-exploitation trade-offs in collective foraging.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Dopamine and the interdependency of time perception and reward.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2021Review
- The Free-movement pattern Y-maze: A cross-species measure of working memory and executive function.Behavior research methods · 2021Article
- Efficient Lévy walks in virtual human foraging.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Functional advantages of Lévy walks emerging near a critical point.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Article
- Optimal searching behaviour generated intrinsically by the central pattern generator for locomotion.eLife · 2019Article
- Search as a simple take-the-best heuristic.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
- Current status and future directions of Lévy walk research.Biology open · 2018Review
- Lévy foraging patterns of rural humans.PloS one · 2018Article
- The evolutionary origins of Lévy walk foraging.PLoS computational biology · 2017Article
- Subjective expectation of rewards can change the behavior of smart but impatient foragers.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2016Article
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5 authors.
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Abstract
Understanding the exploration patterns of foragers in the wild provides fundamental insight into animal behavior. Recent experimental evidence has demonstrated that path lengths (distances between consecutive turns) taken by foragers are well fitted by a power law distribution. Numerous theoretical contributions have posited that "Lévy random walks"-which can produce power law path length distributions-are optimal for memoryless agents searching a sparse reward landscape. It is unclear, however, whether such a strategy is efficient for cognitively complex agents, from wild animals to humans. Here, we developed a model to explain the emergence of apparent power law path length distributions in animals that can learn about their environments. In our model, the agent's goal during search is to build an internal model of the distribution of rewards in space that takes into account the cost of time to reach distant locations (i.e., temporally discounting rewards). For an agent with such a goal, we find that an optimal model of exploration in fact produces hyperbolic path lengths, which are well approximated by power laws. We then provide support for our model by showing that humans in a laboratory spatial exploration task search space systematically and modify their search patterns under a cost of time. In addition, we find that path length distributions in a large dataset obtained from free-ranging marine vertebrates are well described by our hyperbolic model. Thus, we provide a general theoretical framework for understanding spatial exploration patterns of cognitively complex foragers.
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