  Foraging is a crucial activity, yet the extent to which humans employ
flexible versus rigid strategies remains unclear. This study investigates how
individuals adapt their foraging strategies in response to resource
distribution and foraging time constraints. For this, we designed a
video-game-like foraging task that requires participants to navigate a
four-areas environment to collect coins from treasure boxes within a limited
time. This task engages multiple cognitive abilities, such as navigation,
learning, and memorization of treasure box locations. Findings indicate that
participants adjust their foraging strategies -- encompassing both
stay-or-leave decisions, such as the number of boxes opened in initial areas
and behavioral aspects, such as the time to navigate from box to box --
depending on both resource distribution and foraging time. Additionally, they
improved their performance over time as an effect of both enhanced navigation
skills and adaptation of foraging strategies. Finally, participants'
performance was initially distant from the reward-maximizing performance of
optimal agents due to the learning process humans undergo; however, it
approximated the optimal agent's performance towards the end of the task,
without fully reaching it. These results highlight the flexibility of human
foraging behavior and underscore the importance of employing optimality models
and ecologically rich scenarios to study foraging.
