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Poster C144 in Poster Session C - Friday, August 9, 2024, 11:15 am – 1:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Spatial regularity of rewards modulates reward skipping during naturalistic 3D foraging task
Jaeyoung Jeon123 (), Wonmok Shim1234, Sungbum Michael Yoo1234; 1SKKU, 2Ctr. for Neurosci. Imaging Res., Inst. for Basic Sci. (IBS), Suwon, Korea, Republic of, 3Dept. of Intelligent Precision Healthcare Convergence,, 43Dept. of Biomed. Engin., Sungkyunkwan Univ., Suwon, Korea, Republic of
While economic decision-making theories typically assume that choices aimed at maximizing rewards are made between available options, foragers often reject an immediate option (i.e., skipping). We hypothesize that foragers exhibit skipping behavior when they prioritize information regarding future rewards and strategically plan ahead to encounter potentially more advantageous options. This behavior is likely to occur in environments with a level of regularity that enables predictability. To test this hypothesis, we manipulated the spatial distribution of rewards in a naturalistic harvesting task to make future rewards more predictable. Our findings show that skipping becomes more frequent as the predictability of future rewards increases. Crucially, a generative model that effectively captures human behavior suggests that skipping results from a compound action policy that prioritizes information-seeking and allows for the flexible adjustment of planning depth. The increased frequency of skipping, which leads to better performance selectively in predictable environments with spatial regularity, indicates that skipping behavior is an adaptive decision to maximize rewards in predictable environments.
Keywords: Decision making Foraging Reward Planning