Journal article
Biased belief updating and suboptimal choice in foraging decisions
- Abstract:
- Deciding which options to engage, and which to forego, requires developing accurate beliefs about the overall distribution of prospects. Here we adapt a classic prey selection task from foraging theory to examine how individuals keep track of an environment's reward rate and adjust choices in response to its fluctuations. Preference shifts were most pronounced when the environment improved compared to when it deteriorated. This is best explained by a trial-by-trial learning model in which participants estimate the reward rate with upward vs. downward changes controlled by separate learning rates. A failure to adjust expectations sufficiently when an environment becomes worse leads to suboptimal choices: options that are valuable given the environmental conditions are rejected in the false expectation that better options will materialize. These findings offer a previously unappreciated parallel in the serial choice setting of observations of asymmetric updating and resulting biased (often overoptimistic) estimates in other domains.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, 845.5KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41467-020-16964-5
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Nature Communications More from this journal
- Volume:
- 11
- Issue:
- 1
- Article number:
- 3417
- Publication date:
- 2020-07-09
- Acceptance date:
- 2020-05-27
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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2041-1723
- Pmid:
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32647271
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
1119669
- Local pid:
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pubs:1119669
- Deposit date:
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2021-01-14
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Crown
- Copyright date:
- 2020
- Rights statement:
- © Crown 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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