What Can Cognitive Psychology Tell Us of Fish Search Behavior?

Pavlovian conditioning and foraging theory are foundational topics in psychology and ecology that both study the behavior of animals in obtaining rewards and avoiding punishment. However, their approaches, vocabularies and theories are very different. For example, psychology considers conditioning animals to respond to stimuli, response extinction and its spontaneous recovery while ecology considers diets, patch selection and predator-prey functional forms. In psychology, behaviors are typically explained in terms of learning, memory retrieval and interference, or temporal weighting of expectations while in ecology behaviors are often explained in terms of optimality criteria involving energy gain or risk reduction from alternative behaviors.

I suggest that behaviors observed in Pavlovian conditioning experiments are essentially laboratory-constrained realizations of behaviors animals use in their natural environment. Building on this idea, I propose that patterns observed in appetitive Pavlovian conditioning, such as feeding response acquisition, extinction and recovery of the response, parallel animal patch foraging behaviors such as entering, exiting and returning to a patch. Furthermore, Pavlovian conditioning patterns developed with appetitive and aversive stimuli are significantly different and reflect different mechanisms by which animals respond to prey and predator encounters. I outline a mechanistic model developed with C. Bracis (UW) and A. Goodwin (ACOE) to describe behaviors in both laboratory and natural environments in terms of reward/punishment expectations and uncertainties over distal and proximal temporal scales. Finally, I suggest that drawing on principles in ecology and psychology provides a more robust approach to modeling behavior in both fields.