When well-known food resources are running out, animals extinguish their foraging behavior in that food patch and increasingly work for reward-related information. This re-orientation serves to decrease outcome uncertainty of foraging. To this end, animals start spending more time and effort searching for other profitable locations. This phenomenon is well known from extinction learning experiments conducted in conventional conditioning chambers where extinction ignites all kinds of novel behaviors. Now Bochum biopsychologists could show that such predictions of extinction learning research also accord with ecological observations when tested under semi-natural foraging situations. This opens new avenues of testing extinction learning mechanisms as components of ecological behavior.

Anselme, P., Oeksuez, F., Okur, N., Pusch, R., Güntürkün, O., Effortful foraging activity for uncertain food in pigeons, Int. J. Comp. Psychol., 2024, 36: 37.