Participants must collect as many points (apples) from patches (trees) within the time limit, which is 7-minutes per environment. Participants choose between selecting to stay and exploit a known patch (by pressing 'S' on the keyboard) or leaving to explore a new patch (by pressing 'L' on the keyboard). If participants choose to stay with a patch, they will see the number of apples they have collected on that turn along with their cumulative score. The longer participants stay with a patch, they fewer rewards they collect on each exploit decision, until there are 0 apples left. Participants must therefore decide the point at which exploring a new patch (tree) is more beneficial than staying with the current patch. The 'leaving threshold' variable is the average number of apples participants saw on their last stay decision before choosing to explore a new patch (see paper for further information).
If you wish to use the 'deviation from the optimal leaving threshold' variable that was used in the paper, simulation code to determine the optimal leaving threshold can be found at: https://osf.io/72m9x/. Please contact the corresponding author if you have any questions related to the design and/or analysis of the task.
This open materials page includes the full experiment, which included four foraging environments ('Patch Foraging Experiment'). If you wish to run a shorter experiment, we recommend using at least two of the foraging environments.
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Patch foraging environment 1. Depletion rate has a mean of 0.88 (SD = 0.07) and travel time is 6 seconds.
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Patch foraging environment 2. Depletion rate has a mean of 0.94 (SD = 0.07) and travel time is 6 seconds. Note, in rare cases some participants with poor internet connections can get stuck in a 'timeout loop' where the task does not register their responses.
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Patch foraging environment 3. Depletion rate has a mean of 0.88 (SD = 0.07) and travel time is 12 seconds.
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Patch foraging environment 2. Depletion rate has a mean of 0.94 (SD = 0.07) and travel time is 12 seconds.
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Indicative instructions to participants.
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Example outline of the patch foraging task. This includes: instructions to participants, a practice environment and the four environments in counterbalanced order. This should take a total of 30 minutes to complete.
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Practice foraging environment. Parameters of the environment are different to any of the other foraging environments and include additional prompts.
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This screen will present participants' final score on the screen (if you wish to record this to calculate a performance-dependent bonus). The score will also be stored in the excel file so that you do not have to manually record this value for each participant.
Fully open! Access by URL and searchable from the Open Materials search page
