Abstract
All species face the important adaptive problem of efficiently locating high-quality nutritional resources. We explored whether human spatial cognition is enhanced for high-calorie foods, in a large multisensory experiment that covertly tested the location memory of people who navigated a maze-like food setting. We found that individuals incidentally learned and more accurately recalled locations of high-calorie foods – regardless of explicit hedonic valuations or personal familiarity with foods. In addition, the high-calorie bias in human spatial memory already became evident within a limited sensory environment, where solely odor information was available. These results suggest that human minds continue to house a cognitive system optimized for energy-efficient foraging within erratic food habitats of the past, and highlight the often underestimated capabilities of the human olfactory sense.
Highlights
All species face the important adaptive problem of efficiently locating high-quality nutritional resources
A central theorem of optimal foraging theory is that an individual’s fitness is a direct function of the efficiency with which one acquires energy, and natural selection pressures favour foraging traits that maximize the net rate of energy g ain[1,2]
Using an innovative and ecologically valid experimental set-up that covertly tested the food location memory of more than 500 individuals, we provide first-hand evidence that human spatial processing is implicitly biased toward high-calorie foods
Summary
All species face the important adaptive problem of efficiently locating high-quality nutritional resources. The high-calorie bias in human spatial memory already became evident within a limited sensory environment, where solely odor information was available. These results suggest that human minds continue to house a cognitive system optimized for energy-efficient foraging within erratic food habitats of the past, and highlight the often underestimated capabilities of the human olfactory sense. Such an inbuilt spatial bias entails the automatic registration and prioritization in memory of high-calorie food locations This would have enabled foragers to efficiently navigate toward valuable calorie-dense resources – without competing for limited attentional capacities required in other important activities such as avoiding predation[4,6]. We compared performance, expressed as the proportion of correct food-to-pillar relocations in a surprise spatial memory task, for high-calorie versus low-calorie food stimuli in both sensory environments
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
