Understanding human visual foraging: a review

Visual foraging tasks provide great insights into how organisms orient within their visual environment. These tasks are useful for simultaneously investigating concepts often addressed separately, such as attentional guidance, working memory, and strategy. Foraging tasks enable the study of continuous real-world visual exploration and how information about the environment is gathered. They yield rich and multifaceted datasets and can provide insights into the mechanisms of visual attention, visual search, visual memory, and other cognitive factors in a setting more closely resembling how we employ those factors in the real world. We provide a review of the literature and discuss the pros and cons of different ways of understanding and explaining human foraging. A popular approach has been to test whether foraging performance fits certain mathematical rules, such as the marginal value theorem, or so-called Lévy flights. We question the usefulness of such approaches, in particular in the context human foraging (or the foraging of any organism with a sizeable nervous system). The goals and rewards that determine foraging behavior are multifaceted, and understanding those will bring us closer to understanding how humans interact with the world. The usefulness of assessing whether performance falls in line with a particular mathematical rule is, in our opinion, questionable and resources may have been wasted on trying to answer such questions, instead of focusing on the rich insights that foraging data provides about vision, attentional selection, visual short-term memory and the gathering of information.