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16:30 - 18:00
Parallel sessions 6
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16:30 - 18:00
Room: C-Building - N14
Chair/s:
Jan Tünnermann, Iris Wiegand
In visual foraging, people search continuously for multiple targets across space and time. Perceptual, attentional, and decision-making processes act together to efficiently collect visual targets from dynamic environments. This symposium addresses how flexibly humans adapt their behaviour in these complex search tasks akin to many real-world search scenarios. Thornton and Kristjánsson will discuss the impact of grouping on “foraging for change” when searching in time-varying environments. Kristjánsson et al. investigate whether cross-modal synchrony cues influence foraging. Sauter and Tünnermann demonstrate how statistical learning guides the discovery of spatiotemporal hotspots in dynamic foraging tasks, highlighting sensitivity to environmental regularities. Hughes and Clarke present advances in modelling foraging behaviour to capture the dynamics of target selection. Finally, Wiegand shows that a foraging task with memory load can uncover both cognitive impairments, as well as compensatory strategies, in patients with Korsakoff syndrome and alcohol use disorder. Together, these contributions demonstrate how adaptive foraging behaviour emerges in response to the complex demands of dynamic, interactive environments.
Submission 319
Hybrid Foraging Reveals Cognitive Deficits and Compensatory Behaviour in Patients with Korsakoff Syndrome and Alcohol Use Disorder
SymposiumTalk-05
Presented by: Iris Wiegand
Iris Wiegand 1, Josefine Schedlowski 1, Roy P. C. Kessels 1, 2
1 Radboud University, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen, Netherlands
2 Vincent van Gogh Institute for Psychiatry, Venray, Netherlands
Korsakoff’s syndrome (KS), a chronic disorder due to thiamine deficiency commonly associated with alcohol use disorder (AUD), is characterized by amnesia as well as visuospatial deficits. In this study, we tested how these cognitive impairments interact during complex, realistic search tasks using a hybrid visual-and-memory foraging task.

KS patients, AUD patients without cognitive impairment, and healthy controls (HC) first memorized either 2 or 8 target objects. Subsequently, they “collected” multiple instances of these targets, presented among distractors, across multiple displays (“patches”). Collected targets disappeared from patches, making the task progressively more challenging when continuing to search within a patch. Participants could freely decide when to leave a current patch to explore a new one. The goal was to maximize target collections over time.

Our results demonstrated a gradual decline in search speed from HC to AUD to KS. Furthermore, patients with KS showed higher costs of increasing distractor and memory load than both AUD patients and HC. Under high memory load, both KS and AUD searched in “runs” of specific target types, thereby avoiding switch costs. Finally, all groups made near-optimal patch-leaving decisions (maximizing collections per unit time), although KS and AUD patients missed more targets under high memory load.

These findings highlight the interplay of episodic memory deficits, selective attention impairments, and decision-making during complex, realistic search tasks. While search speed and efficiency are reduced in patients with KS—and even in AUD—compared to HC, they nonetheless adapt their search strategies.