Fig. 2.

(A) Serial stay-switch task. Participants traveled to different planets and mined for space gems across five 6-min blocks. On each trial, they had to decide between staying to dig from a depleting gem mine or incurring a time cost to travel to a new planet. (B) Environment structure. Planets varied in their richness or, more specifically, the rate at which they exponentially decayed with each dig. There were three planet types: poor, neutral, and rich—each with its own characteristic distribution over decay rates. (C) Environment dynamics. Planets of a similar type clustered together. A new planet had an 80% probability of being the same type as the prior planet (“no switch”). However, there was a 20% probability of transitioning or “switching” to a planet of a different type.