Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Foraging over land for resources was central to the evolutionof search processes and decision-making for many organisms,including humans. The processes underlying natural foragingbehaviors are foundational to cognition. However, in the field,it is difficult to collect detailed and accurate measures of searchbehaviors and hard to manipulate search conditions. We usedGoogle Earth and the Unity 3D platform to recreate a patchof the Himalayan foothills with ancient temples used as way-points for travelers on foot. Two hundred players recruited viaMTurk moved over the landscape with realistic speed, energyusage, and perceptual conditions to find as many temples aspossible given a limited energy budget. Half were constrainedby the need to return to a home base to report found temples,and half were not. When search paths were analyzed in termsof segment distributions, players who found relatively moretemples (high scorers) more closely followed the theoreticallyoptimal L ́evy walk that balances exploration and exploitation,regardless of the home base. This intrinsic pattern was alsofound in perceptual search intervals, with high scorers lean-ing more towards exploration. By contrast, when search pathswere analyzed as wholes, an extrinsic pattern was found in thatplayers ranged farther without a home base, and this differ-ence was more pronounced for high scorers. We conclude thatL ́evy-like patterns are intrinsic and effective in terms of pathsegments and perceptual intervals, but overall search behavioradapts to extrinsic factors and constraints.