Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The hybrid foraging paradigm mimics a wide range of real-world searching scenarios. In the hybrid foraging paradigm, foragers search for multiple targets in multiple patches throughout the foraging session. In this study, we incorporate an element of risk in the standard hybrid foraging paradigm, and investigate the effects of risk and prevalence on foraging behavior. The primary finding reveals that human foragers tend to prefer certainty and avoid risk when performing hybrid foraging tasks. Changing the prevalence of the risky targets modulates the aversion to risk, but overall the effect of risk still outweighs the effect of prevalence. Our findings suggest that risk aversion might lead to sub-optimal foraging strategies.