Supplementary Material for the manuscript "Using Computer Games to Explore Foraging-Predation Trade-offs and Spatial Learning in Humans" submitted to Behavioral Ecology

Foraging is a fundamental behavior through which animals acquire resources vital for survival and reproduction. While foraging, animals must balance energetic gains against costs, including predation risk and the potential benefits of exploring versus exploiting known resources. In this study, we used two computer games to examine how human participants change their foraging behavior under varying environmental conditions, drawing inspiration from animal foraging. Participants played two games: an open-field foraging task with “safe” and “risky” contexts simulating predation risk, and a maze-navigation task assessing spatial learning and consistency. The open-field task manipulated predation risk and measured behaviors, such as hiding time and patch visitation patterns. The maze task tracked performance across repeated trips to evaluate spatial learning. In the open-field task, risk reduced foraging efficiency, increased hiding, and affected patch visitation, but primarily for participants who began in the safe context. This suggests a task sequence effect, where early exposure to risk altered later behavior even in a safe environment. Moreover, individual performance was highly consistent across the safe and risky foraging tasks, and moderately consistent between the open-field and maze games, indicating stable spatial performances across contexts. In the maze-navigation task, participants showed typical negatively accelerated learning curves, indicating spatial learning. These findings support key concepts in foraging theory, including the foraging-predation trade-off, exploration-exploitation dynamics, spatial learning, and carryover effects between behavioral contexts. The latter finding also highlights the need to control for the test order in behavioral research. Finally, our study demonstrates the usefulness of game-based platforms to simulate ecological scenarios, analyze adaptive decision-making in humans, and compare it to that observed in other animals.