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Updated: Feb 3, 2026
13:01
A Single-fly Assay for Foraging Behavior in Drosophila
Published on: November 4, 2013
13.7K
Control of movement vigor and decision making during foraging
Tehrim Yoon1, Robert B Geary1, Alaa A Ahmed2,3
1Laboratory for Computational Motor Control, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD 21205.
Summary
Animals foraging for rewards may use a single brain strategy to decide when to leave a patch and how fast to move to the next. This principle optimizes reward acquisition and minimizes effort expenditure over time.
Area of Science:
- Behavioral neuroscience
- Cognitive psychology
- Decision science
Background:
- Foraging animals balance reward harvesting with movement effort.
- The brain's mechanisms for controlling departure decisions and movement vigor remain incompletely understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if a single normative principle governs both patch departure decisions and movement vigor during foraging.
- To test if maximizing net reward over time explains observed behaviors.
Main Methods:
- Human participants viewed images, controlling gaze duration (harvesting) and saccade speed (movement).
- Image content (reward) and eccentricity (effort) were manipulated.
- Gaze duration and saccade speed were measured to assess decision-making and motor control.
Main Results:
- Lower past rewards increased gaze duration and decreased saccade speed.
- Anticipating future effort reduced saccade speed and increased gaze duration.
- Higher past effort increased saccade speed and gaze duration.
Conclusions:
- A unified control principle, optimizing net reward over time, may underlie both harvest duration and movement speed.
- Experimental results partially support the proposed theory, suggesting a shared control mechanism for fundamental foraging behaviors.
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