ArticleInterface focus2017
Sampling and tracking a changing environment: persistence and reward in the foraging decisions of bumblebees.
Article in Interface focus, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Duration discrimination in the bumblebeeBiology letters · 2025Article
- Unlocking the secrets of the human gut microbiota: Comprehensive review on its role in different diseases.World journal of gastroenterology · 2025Review
- Economic foraging in a floral marketplace: asymmetrically dominated decoy effects in bumblebees.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- A minimal model of learning: quantifying the cost and benefit of learning in changing environments.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Label-based expectations affect incentive contrast effects in bumblebees.Biology letters · 2022Article
- Cognitive flexibility in the wild: Individual differences in reversal learning are explained primarily by proactive interference, not by sampling strategies, in two passerine bird species.Learning & behavior · 2022Article
- Irrational risk aversion in an ant.Animal cognition · 2021Article
- Article
- Noisy communities and signal detection: why do foragers visit rewardless flowers?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The question of when to collect new information and how to apply that information is central to much of behaviour. Theory suggests that the value of collecting information, or sampling, depends on environmental persistence and on the relative costs of making wrong decisions. However, empirical tests of how these variables interact are lacking. We tested whether bumblebee foraging decisions are indeed influenced by these two factors. We gave bees repeated choices between a resource providing a steady, mediocre reward and a resource fluctuating between a low reward and a high reward. In this paradigm, we manipulated environmental persistence by changing how long the quality of a fluctuating resource remained stable at one reward level. We manipulated the costs of decision errors by changing the relative values of the available rewards. Bees sampled the fluctuating resource more frequently when it changed quality more frequently, indicating that they measured environmental persistence and reacted to it as predicted by theory. Bees showed surprisingly suboptimal tracking, not reliably choosing the currently best resource except when the fluctuating resource was very persistent and the potential rewards high. While bees modify their choices in response to different levels of change and potential rewards, they do not always do so according to optimality predictions.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.