Abstract
Foraging is a central competence of all mobile organisms. Models and concepts from foraging theory have been applied widely throughout biology to the search for many kinds of external resources, including food, sexual encounters, minerals, water, and the like. In cognitive science and neuroscience, the tools of foraging theory are increasingly applied to a wide range of other types of search, including for abstract resources like information or for internal resources like memories, concepts, and strategies for problem solving. Despite its importance in ecology and increasing relevance for the study of cognition, the concept of foraging is rarely analyzed. Here, I aim to rectify this situation. I outline three desiderata: first, an analysis should differentiate foraging from search and decision making more generally; second, an analysis should unify different types of foraging; and third, an analysis should help ground predictions. I present an analysis of foraging as the serial search for general resources in accept-or-reject, exclusive, persistent decision contexts. Not all search is serial and not all decision making is exclusive, differentiating foraging from search and decision making generally. With the aid of Markov decision processes and directed cyclical models, I show how the analysis implies a cyclical graph. This cyclical graph is embedded in the description of many types of foraging, unifying the different instances. Finally, I argue that the cyclical graph is also embedded in representations of novel task contexts that have not previously been viewed as foraging. I illustrate this novel application of the concept of foraging by arguing that reasoning is a type of foraging.
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Notes
Here, I often talk about the forager’s knowledge of what they are searching for. Knowledge may not be the best description of the epistemic status of foragers. For convenience, however, I will often speak of knowledge. A deeper evaluation of the epistemic status of foragers must await a different venue.
Strictly speaking, representations of actions instead of representations of items, but I will skip over this nicety.
Persistence is essentially temporal. Graphs can be time-resolved as well, but shifting to time-resolved graphs is a complication beyond the scope of this discussion.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Naomi Rosenkranz, Thomas Hills, Eric Leonardis, and the Future of Foraging Seminar Series for helpful commentary and feedback.
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