PHYSORG
Birds do it. Bees do it. Even little kids picking strawberries do it.
Every creature that forages for food decides at some point that the food source they’re working on is no richer than the rest of the patch and that it’s time to move on and find something better.
This kind of foraging decision is a fundamental problem that goes far back in evolutionary history and is dealt with by creatures that don’t even have proper brains, said Michael Platt, a professor of neurobiology and director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University.
Platt and his colleagues now say they’ve identified a function in the primate brain that appears to be handling this stay-or-go problem. They have found that the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), an area of the brain known to operate while weighing conflicts, steadily increases its activity during foraging decisions until a threshold level of activity is reached, whereupon the individual decides it’s time to move on.
In lab experiments with rhesus macaque monkeys, Platt and postdoctoral fellows Benjamin Hayden and John Pearson put the animals through a series of trials in which they repeatedly had to decide whether to stay with a source that was giving ever-smaller squirts of fruit juice, or move to another, possibly better, source. The animals were merely gazing at a preferred target on a display screen, not moving from one tree to the next, but the decision-making process should be the same, Platt said.
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