Beyond Scalar Choice: Foraging as a Policy Framework for Decision Neuroscience
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Foraging is a fundamental form of decision-making, requiring animals to search, evaluate resources,allocate effort, manage risk, and coordinate behavior. Much of foraging neuroscience reduces thisbehavior to scalar choice, using reward magnitude, delay, effort, risk, or opportunity cost to explainwhether an animal stays or leaves, accepts or rejects, harvests or switches. We argue that thisapproach leaves a defining feature of foraging underdeveloped. Animals do not simply comparevalues at isolated decision points. They implement policies that organize state-dependent patternsof approach, inspection, consumption, transport, withdrawal, persistence, and disengagement overtime. Here we propose a policy-centered perspective in which the primary explanatory unit is themapping from internal and external states onto an organized repertoire of actions. This frameworkretains the normative strengths of optimal foraging theory while broadening the interpretation ofdepartures from its predictions. Apparent suboptimality may reveal hidden costs, latent state variables,or changes in policy organization rather than a simple failure of valuation. This perspectivealso reframes the neural problem. Understanding foraging as policy points to a distributed neuralbasis that integrates valuation, spatial memory, action selection, risk regulation, and behavioralsequencing. By shifting the unit of analysis from scalar choice to policy organization, foraging providesa principled bridge across behavioral ecology, decision neuroscience, reinforcement learning,and research on artificial agents.
Source: PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7213937382