Impulsiveness without discounting: the ecological rationality hypothesis
TLDR
It is found that impulsive rules are optimal in a simple foreground–background choice situation in the absence of discounting, and that comparable impulsiveness is not found in binary choice situations even when there is strong discounting.Abstract:
Observed animal impulsiveness challenges ideas from foraging theory about the fitness value of food rewards, and may play a role in important behavioural phenomena such as cooperation and addiction. Behavioural ecologists usually invoke temporal discounting to explain the evolution of animal impulsiveness. According to the discounting hypothesis, delay reduces the fitness value of the delayed food. We develop an alternative model for the evolution of impulsiveness that does not require discounting. We show that impulsive or short-sighted rules can maximize long-term rates of food intake. The advantages of impulsive rules come from two sources. First, naturally occurring choices have a foreground-background structure that reduces the long-term cost of impulsiveness. Second, impulsive rules have a discrimination advantage because they tend to compare smaller quantities. Discounting contributes little to this result. Although we find that impulsive rules are optimal in a simple foreground-background choice situation in the absence of discounting, in contrast we do not find comparable impulsiveness in binary choice situations even when there is strong discounting.read more
Citations
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The Evolutionary Origins of Human Patience: Temporal Preferences in Chimpanzees, Bonobos, and Human Adults
TL;DR: It is suggested that core components of the capacity for future-oriented decisions evolved before the human lineage diverged from apes and the different levels of patience that humans exhibit might be driven by fundamental differences in the mechanisms representing biological versus abstract rewards.
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Is a bird in the hand worth two in the future? The neuroeconomics of intertemporal decision-making
TL;DR: The most recent literature on the behavioural and neural processes underlying intertemporal choices are reviewed, and to which extent these findings can be used to explain violations of DUT's assumptions are elucidated.
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Exposing the behavioral gambit: the evolution of learning and decision rules
TL;DR: This work highlights three future research priorities: systematic theoretical analysis of the evolutionary properties of learning rules; detailed empirical study of how animals learn in nonforaging contexts; and analysis of individual differences in learning rules and their associated fitness consequences.
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Decision ecology: foraging and the ecology of animal decision making.
TL;DR: The approach taken by behavioral ecologists to the study of animal foraging behavior is reviewed and connections with general analyses of decision making are explored and data suggest that foraging animals are sensitive to several important trade-offs.
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Hastiness, brain size and predation regime affect the performance of wild guppies in a spatial memory task
James G. Burns,F. Helen Rodd +1 more
TL;DR: It is shown that the careful observation of an animal's strategy for solving spatial problems may reveal subtle differences that are associated with ecology and brain size, as well as the difference in brain size in relation to predation regime.
References
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