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Studying Choice Behavior with
Multiple Alternatives and Complex Locomotion. The travel distance between alternatives
plays an important role in the decision of when to leave a patch
and enter a new one. When moving to a richer patch is more costly
than staying in the same place, the organism will maximize the
rate of reinforcement by staying longer in the current patch.
This prediction was tested in a choice situation where the number
of alternatives varied from 4 to 8, and where the rats had to
climb barriers of different heights to move from one place to
another. The data showed that the rats' response pattern of searching
for food changed as a function of travel requirement and number
of available alternatives. With four alternatives and barriers
of 15.2 cm, the slopes of the generalized matching law were above
1.1. When the height of the barriers Keywords: overmatching, patch, complex-locomotion, barrier, rats. |
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