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

Valter Prpic,Marcello Gómez Maureira,Elizabeth Camilleri,Isabelle Kniestedt,Ian M. Thornton,Árni Kristjánsson,Alastair Smith

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0219827

Abstract

Traditional search tasks have taught us much about vision and attention. Recently, several groups have begun to use multiple-target search to explore more complex and temporally extended “foraging” behaviour. Many of these new foraging tasks, however, maintain the simplified 2D displays and response demands associated with traditional, single-target visual search. In this respect, they may fail to capture important aspects of real-world search or foraging behaviour. In the current paper, we present a serious game for mobile platforms, developed in Unity3D, in which human participants play the role of an animal foraging for food in a simulated 3D environment. Game settings can be adjusted, so that, for example, custom target and distractor items can be uploaded, and task parameters, such as the number of target categories or target/distractor ratio are all easy to modify. We are also making the Unity3D project available, so that further modifications can also be made. We demonstrate how the app can be used to address specific research questions by conducting two human foraging experiments. Our results indicate that in this 3D environment, a standard feature/conjunction manipulation does not lead to a reduction in foraging runs, as it is known to do in simple, 2D foraging tasks.

Highlights

When humans or animals explore an environment, their behavior is guided by a variety of factors
The purpose of the current paper is to describe our initial findings with a new research tool that incorporates aspects of both traditional visual search and animal foraging paradigms
We should note that in a very recent 2D study [49], we have shown that removing performance consequences when selecting a distractor, and counting the number of errors, has little or no impact on patterns of run behavior

Summary

Introduction

When humans or animals explore an environment, their behavior is guided by a variety of factors. Search behavior in the real-world is often more complex than this, for example, involving multiple target episodes with less clearly defined end states Traditional studies, with their limited selection scenarios, may offer only a limited picture of attentional selection in the wider environment. To address these concerns, a number of labs have sought inspiration from the animal literature mentioned above and have begun to investigate how humans “forage” for multiple targets [24,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34]. A number of key findings from the animal literature have been found to have parallels in human behavior, including search in extended “runs” [24], Lèvy flights [31], the predictions of Marginal Value Theorem [34] and “area-restricted search” [35]

Objectives

Results

Conclusion