Figure 1.

Diagram of the foraging task. A, On trial n, the rat chose to press the lever to harvest from the patch, then received reward in the reward magazine in the center of the chamber. After an ITI (7 s), the rat chose to press the same lever on trial n + 1 to harvest a smaller volume of reward. On trial n + 2, the rat chose to nose poke in the back of the chamber, initiating a “travel time” delay (10 s), after which, the rat could continue to harvest in a replenished patch by pressing the lever on the other side of the chamber (trial n + 3). B, Reward depletion curves for each of the nine patch starting reward volumes. Colors indicate whether the patch was a subjective low, medium, or high reward patch, for consistency with further analyses.