Bursts and Heavy Tails in Temporal and Sequential Dynamics of Foraging Decisions
Figure 1
An example of the empirical choice patterns and the mean choice percentage of consumed pellets by food location, flavor, and rank.
(A) The foraging behavior of a representative rat for two days, day 5 and day 14, illustrating the choice dynamics. The ordinate represents each food location/type and the abscissa represents the hour of the day. The light and dark cycles are denoted as yellow and black bars above each day's choice plot, with overall choice plotted per hour below the choice plot. The histogram to the right shows the total choices for the entire experiment. For subject 2, the rank 1 flavor (red color) was chocolate, located at the far right [RR]; the rank 2 (orange color) was coffee, middle left [ML]; the rank 3 (green color) was banana, middle right [MR]; finally, the rank 4 (blue color) was cinnamon, at the far left [LL]. (B) Entropy changes of representative data over trials. Black and red solid lines represent the entropy changes of the empirical and randomly shuffled data, respectively. (C) Mean choice percentage for specific food locations (LL, ML, MR, and RR) across subjects. (D) Mean choice percentage by flavor across subjects. (E) The mean choice percentage across subjects for each rank is shown in a log-linear scale. Choice percentage linearly decreases as a function of log(rank order). The dotted line is the log-linear fit (the slope = −70.7±4.95 [mean ± s.e.m], adj. R2 = 0.994). For all figures, error bars are standard errors of the mean (s.e.m). In C, D and E, a Dunnett-T3 post hoc test was conducted: *p<0.05, **p<0.01, ***p<0.001.