Patchy Perception: Rethinking Eye Movements through the Lens of Foraging Theory

Foraging theory provides a powerful framework for reframing visual attention mechanisms, conceptualizing eye movements and visual search as specialized instances of patch foraging problems, rather than viewing them solely through traditional cognitive psychology paradigms. This approach offers new insights into how visual attention optimizes exploration strategies in humans and animals. Using human data from image exploration tasks with items held in short-term memory, we demonstrate that participants spend more time on informationally rich stimuli (memory-matched images) and employ strategies to minimize travel time to these high-value targets—behaviors consistent with optimal patch foraging. Our proposed analytical approach aims at a more foundational question in movement ecology: Why might animals partition their environment into patches of information as they move through it? This work provides a foundation for new ways to analyze already existing data and design experimental paradigms bridging visual neuroscience and behavioral ecology approaches.