J.M.C. Hutchinson, A. Wilke & P.M. Todd 2008. Patch leaving in humans: can a generalist adapt its rules to dispersal of items across patches? Animal Behaviour 75: 1331–1349.

Despite Elsevier's endeavors to obscure the fact, Animal Behaviour allows authors to put a copy of the pdf on their personal WEB page. This is a lovely journal to publish in.

Download pdf file from here free.
Download supplementary material from here free.
doi: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2007.09.006 to access article via journal.

Update

We overlooked one very relevant study by Hart & Jackson (1986) in which human subjects foraged for sultanas hung out on artificial bushes.

Here is a link to our companion paper on switching between anagram tasks.

The following paper is particularly relevant in showing that bumblebees succeed where humans failed: they can change from an incremental rule to a decremental one dependent on recent foraging experience. Biernaskie, Walker & Gegear (2009) Bumblebees learn to forage like Bayesians. Am. Nat. 147: 413–423.

Our work has stimulated another computer foraging game: Louâpre P., van Alphen J.J.M., Pierre J.-S., (2010) Humans and insects decide in similar ways. PLoS ONE 5(12): e14251.
The results are quite a contrast to ours and I discuss in an online comment on the article why this might be so.

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