Rational Choice, Context Dependence, and the Value of Information in European Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris)

FREIDIN, E.; KACELNIK, A.

SCIENCE

AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE

Año: 2011 vol. 334 p. 1000 - 1002

0036-8075

Both human and nonhuman decision-makers can deviate from optimal choice by makingcontext-dependent choices. Because ignoring context information can be beneficial, this iscalled a “less-is-more effect.” The fact that organisms are so sensitive to the context is thusparadoxical and calls for the inclusion of an ecological perspective. In an experiment withstarlings, adding cues that identified the context impaired performance in simultaneous preychoices but improved it in sequential prey encounters, in which subjects could reject opportunitiesin order to search instead in the background. Because sequential prey encounters are likelyto be more frequent in nature, storing and using contextual information appears to be ecologicallyrational on balance by conditioning acceptance of each opportunity to the relative richnessof the background, even if this causes context-dependent suboptimal preferences in(less-frequent) simultaneous choices. In ecologically relevant scenarios, more informationseems to be more.