5. Describe how the cognitive processes of learning and memory limit the solutions that animals can come up with from the point of view of optimal foraging? Do these processes constrain optimal foraging and if so, why?

Why: Central place foraging assumes that animals have perfect information regarding their

environment. They do not. They have to learn about their environment, and then as they learn, they must remember information about their environment. These cognitive processes place limits on the kinds of optimal choices that animals can make.

Learning a search image could form a short term constraint on finding prey. The amount of time it takes to learn search images my constrain how quickly an animal learns new ones. In addition, for organism that search for very different prey items the search image may not be very useful at all.

Memory: Lets think of a simple model for memory and how it might influence foraging. Imagine that a Bumble Bee has a specified list of items in its memory that describe the profitability of items during bouts of foraging. It has also been termed a memory window.

E1/T1 (last item encountered)

E2/T2 (second last item encountered)

E3/T3 (etc)....

If a bumble bee can only remember the last item upon which it foraged (e.g., E1/T1) then a very short memory might easily explain their risk aversive behavior. They simply avoid variable reward flowers because more often than not (2/3) they come up empty when they first sample them.