Comparing Locomotion With Lever-press Travel In An Operant Simulation Of Foraging.
Travel effort topography matters: adding physical hurdles keeps rats in patches longer, supporting giving-up-time over simple rate models.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers let rats hunt for food in a tiny patch. Travel between patches happened three ways: press a lever, walk, or walk over hurdles.
Each rat tried all three travel types. The team watched how long rats stayed in a patch before moving on.
What they found
Pressing a lever or plain walking gave the same patch times. Adding hurdles made rats stay longer.
The hurdle effect fits McNair's giving-up-time model. It clashes with simple rate-only foraging rules.
How this fits with other research
ZMMelegari et al. (2025) later added a costly reset lever to a progressive-ratio task. Rats again weighed effort against delay, backing the idea that travel form shapes choice.
PREMACSALZINGER et al. (1962) first showed that limiting wheel access shortens the gaps between running bursts. Lord et al. (1997) build on this by showing that travel type, not just access, steadies patch time.
Dugan et al. (1995) tested hens choosing between key peck and door push. Like the hurdle effect, response form acted as a built-in bias under the matching law.
Why it matters
When you shape behavior, think about the response topography. A harder response can glue the animal to the current patch or task. If you want longer engagement, add mild effort like an extra step or a different posture. If you want quick shifts, keep travel responses easy and alike.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
An operant model of foraging was studied. Rats searched for food by pressing on the left lever, the patch, which provided one, two, or eight reinforcers before extinction (i.e., zero reinforcers). Obtaining each reinforcer lowered the probability of receiving another reinforcer, simulating patch depletion. Rats traveled to another patch by pressing the right lever, which restored reinforcer availability to the left lever. Travel requirement changed by varying the probability of reset for presses on the right lever; in one condition, additional locomotion was required. That is, rats ran 260 cm from the left to the right lever, made one response on the right lever, and ran back to a fresh patch on the left lever. Another condition added three hurdles to the 260‐cm path. The lever‐pressing and simple locomotion conditions generated equivalent travel times. Adding the hurdles produced longer times in patches than did the lever‐pressing and simple locomotion requirements. The results contradict some models of optimal foraging but are in keeping with McNair's (1982) optimal giving‐up time model and add to the growing body of evidence that different environments may produce different foraging strategies.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1997 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1997.68-177