Optimal Foraging Requires Coordinating Decisions with Movements

Abstract

Decision-making and motor execution are both constrained by time and energy, and their optimization depends on cost–benefit trade-offs. While many studies suggest that decisions and movements follow common economic principles and can be jointly regulated to maximize reward rate, recent findings indicate that these two processes can also be decoupled or modulated in compensatory ways. This variability raises the question of whether decision–action coordination reflects an optimal strategy aimed at maximizing reward rate or rather a flexible but suboptimal adaptation to contextual constraints. To address this issue, we trained three macaque monkeys, two males and one female, to perform a reaching-based foraging task. The observed adjustments in decision–action coordination of the three monkeys are consistent with the pursuit of a strategy that approximates the theoretical optimum of reward intake rate at the single-trial level. The present findings indicate, both behaviorally and theoretically, that coordination between decision and movement is required to optimize behavior in economic terms.