FoMo: A Unifying Theory of Visual Foraging

Visual foraging lies at the intersection of visual perception, decision-making and action planning. An attractive feature of this paradigm is that it generates a rich stream of sequential decision data. However, this presents a number of challenges for analysis. To this end, we have developed FoMo, a robust and flexible generative model for spatial-sequential data. Building upon initial work by Clarke et al. (2022b), we present FoMo 2.0, which incorporates spatial structure allowing us to model organised spatial behaviours. We test the model over a range of secondary data sources and show that incorporating these parameters improve model accuracy, predominantly due to improvements for a subset of participants who use grid-following strategies. FoMo therefore allows us to explain results that would previously have been categorised as outliers. A real strength of this generative modelling approach is that it can account for individual differences across the wide range of summary statistics that have previously been used to explore human and non-human animal behaviour, providing a unified framework for analysing these data.