Understanding Visual Search and Foraging in Cognitive Development

A serious game to explore human foraging in a 3D environment

“…This finding suggests that the extended run behavior found in our original work [24]which has been replicated a number of times, both by our group [50][51][52] and others [53][54][55][56]does not rely exclusively on the feature/conjunction manipulation. Rather, it implies that this manipulation interacts with other aspects of the task design and/or display characteristics to constrain foraging behavior.…”

Foraging behavior in visual search: A review of theoretical and mathematical models in humans and animals

“…Like in typical visual search tasks as updated in the new Guided Search 6.0 (Wolfe, 2020), memory must play a role in finding target/s defining features and guiding foraging search, especially in hybrid foraging tasks where more than one target must be found and memory may need to invest more resources in the task. Those effects are also consistent during early childhood (Gil-Gómez de Liaño et al, 2018; This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Psychological Research. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-021-01499-1 Gestsdóttir, & , and in older ages (Mata, Wilke, & Czienskowski, 2009Wiegand, Seidel, & Wolfe, 2019).…”

“…Age is also a variable whose relationship with visual search and visual foraging behavior has been contemplated (Gil-Gómez de Liaño et al, 2018Liaño et al, , 2020Mata, Wilke, & Czienskowski, 2009Ólaffsdóttir et al, 2019;Wiegand et al, 2019). A plausible explanation of the relation between age and visual foraging behavior may be the influence of age in other relevant variables already contemplated, such as impulsivity (Gil-Gómez de Liaño et al, 2018), accuracy (Mata et al, 2013), or executive functions (Gil-Gómez de Liaño et al, 2020). This line of research can help us to better understand visual foraging behavior in humans in the lifespan, as well as the development of certain cognitive processes immersed in visual foraging, being worth further study.…”

“…Exhaustive foraging refers to cases where every target must be found before moving to another display or patch (Johánnesson, Kristjánsson, & Thornton, 2017;Kristjánsson et al, 2014Kristjánsson, Thornton, & Kristjánsson, 2018). Non-exhaustive foraging implies that the forager is free to move to the next display or patch at the forager's choice (Biggs, 2017;Ehinger & Wolfe, 2016;Gil-Gómez de Liaño et al, 2018;Wiegand et al, 2019;Wolfe, 2013;Wolfe et al, 2018). Although no one is better than the other one, we will focus on the non-exhaustive foraging approach since it seems more informative to understand the patch-leaving problem (for exhaustive searches, there is indeed no "patch-leaving problem" since the search is quitted when the very last target is gathered).…”

“…For instance, Fougnie et al (2015) and Zhang et al (2015) observed that foragers were sensitive to seasonal changes and changing gradients of a patch and environment profitability, and they concluded that reward and learning can also affect foraging behavior in general and patch-leaving criteria in particular (see also Ehinger & Wolfe, 2016). Also, cognitive development, as well as cognitive decline associated with aging can modulate MVT predictions (Gil-Gómez de Liaño et al, 2018;Wiegand et al, 2019).…”