2022 年 41 巻 1 号 p. 63-68
Optimal foraging theory is a branch of behavioral ecology. This specific set of models tackles questions about how an animal should perform a behavior in a prey-searching situation. In this article, I argue that cognitive psychologists can also benefit from using visual foraging tasks to study human behaviors when searching for visual information. Specifically, by modeling information about the search environment as a gain function and incorporating it into the model, the model of optimal patch use can be used to predict human search behavior. The use of such modeling is expected to lead to the development of visual search research by more clearly defining the assumptions and theory of the behavior to be examined. I also note that the activities of young researchers in cognitive modeling have been particularly remarkable in recent years, and further development is expected in the future.