Foraging is risk sensitive if choices depend on the variability of returns from the options as well as their mean return. Risk-sensitive foraging is important in behavioural ecology, psychology and neurophysiology. It has been explained both in terms of mechanisms and in terms of evolutionary advantage. We provide a critical review, evaluating both mechanistic and evolutionary accounts. Some derivations of risk sensitivity from mechanistic models based on psychophysics are not convincing because they depend on an inappropriate use of Jensen's inequality. Attempts have been made to link risk sensitivity to the ecology of a species, but again these are not convincing. The field of risk-sensitive foraging has provided a focus for theoretical and empirical work and has yielded important insights, but we lack a simple and empirically defendable general account of it in either mechanistic or evolutionary terms. However, empirical analysis of choice sequences under theoretically motivated experimental designs and environmental settings appears a promising avenue for mapping the scope and relative merits of existing theories. Simply put, the devil is in the sequence.

中文翻译：

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对风险敏感觅食的严格审查

如果选择取决于期权回报的可变性及其平均回报，那么觅食就是风险敏感的。风险敏感觅食在行为生态学、心理学和神经生理学中很重要。它已经从机制和进化优势方面得到了解释。我们提供批判性评论，评估机械论和进化论。基于心理物理学的机械模型对风险敏感性的一些推导并不令人信服，因为它们依赖于对詹森不等式的不当使用。人们曾尝试将风险敏感性与物种的生态联系起来，但这些仍然不令人信服。风险敏感觅食领域为理论和实证工作提供了焦点，并产生了重要的见解，但我们缺乏从机械或进化角度对其进行简单且可从经验上论证的一般解释。然而，在理论驱动的实验设计和环境设置下对选择序列进行实证分析似乎是绘制现有理论的范围和相对优点的有前途的途径。简而言之，魔鬼就在序列中。