Abstract
Animals, including humans, consistently exhibit myopia in two different contexts: foraging, in which they harvest locally beyond what is predicted by optimal foraging theory, and intertemporal choice, in which they exhibit a preference for immediate vs. delayed rewards beyond what is predicted by rational (exponential) discounting. Despite the similarity in behavior between these two contexts, previous efforts to reconcile these observations in terms of a consistent pattern of time preferences have failed. Here, via extensive behavioral testing and quantitative modeling, we show that rats exhibit similar time preferences in both contexts: they prefer immediate vs. delayed rewards and they are sensitive to opportunity costs of delays to future decisions. Further, a quasi-hyperbolic discounting model, a form of hyperbolic discounting with separate components for short- and long-term rewards, explains individual rats' time preferences across both contexts, providing evidence for a common mechanism for myopic behavior in foraging and intertemporal choice.
Highlights
Serial stay-or-search problems are ubiquitous across many domains, including employment, internet search, mate search, and animal foraging
We found that rats exhibit similar time preferences in foraging and intertemporal choice tasks and that time preferences in both tasks can be explained by a quasi-hyperbolic discounting model that, in both contexts, considers future rewards
In foraging studies, animals exhibit behavior that conforms qualitatively to predictions made by optimal foraging theory, choosing to leave a patch when its value falls below that of the average expected value of other(s) available in the environment
Summary
Serial stay-or-search problems are ubiquitous across many domains, including employment, internet search, mate search, and animal foraging. The optimal behavior for maximizing this currency in foraging tasks, described by the Marginal Value Theorem (MVT; Charnov, 1976), is to choose the immediately available opportunity if it provides a reward rate greater than the average reward rate across all alternative options, which includes the costs of accessing those options. Animals tend to follow the basic predictions of long-term reward maximization: they are generally more likely to pursue opportunities for larger vs smaller rewards and, if the cost of searching for alternatives is greater, they are more likely to pursue opportunities for smaller rewards (Stephens and Krebs, 1986; Constantino and Daw, 2015; Hayden et al, 2011; Kane et al, 2017).
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