FoMo: A unifying theory of visual foraging.

Abstract

Visual foraging lies at the intersection of visual perception, decision-making and action planning. An attractive feature of this paradigm is that it generates a rich stream of sequential decision data. However, this presents a number of challenges for analysis. To this end, we have developed FoMo, a robust and flexible generative model for spatial-sequential data that allows prediction of participants' selection behaviour on a target-by-target basis. Building upon our initial work, we present an updated version of FoMo (Clarke, et al. PLOS Comput Biol. 18:e1009813, 2022)‌‌, which incorporates spatial structure allowing us to model organised spatial behaviours. FoMo provides estimates of a range of interpretable parameters, meaning we can use it to understand the causes of behavioural differences: for example, incorporating spatial-structure parameters improves model prediction accuracy for a number of visual foraging datasets, predominantly due to improvements for a subset of participants who use grid-following strategies. Our approach can also account for individual differences across the wide range of descriptive statistics that have previously been used to explore human and non-human animal behaviour, providing a unified framework for analysing these data.