Predictions made by the “incentive hope” hypothesis account for overconsumption in unpredictable food environments. However, when applied to uncertain gambling situations, there are several areas where this theory falls short. Most notably, it has trouble explaining why, in slot machine gambling, players are motivated by extended play to spend time trying to resolve uncertainty, rather than hoarding monetary gains.

Food uncertainty has the effect of invigorating food-related responses. Psychologists have noted that mammals and birds respond more to a conditioned stimulus that unreliably predicts food delivery, and ecologists have shown that animals consume and/or hoard more food and can get fatter when access to that resource is unpredictable. Are these phenomena related? We think they are. Psychologists have proposed several mechanistic interpretations, while ecologists have suggested a functional interpretation: The effect of unpredictability on fat reserves and hoarding behavior is (...) an evolutionary strategy acting against the risk of starvation when food is in short supply. Both perspectives are complementary, and we argue that the psychology of incentive motivational processes can shed some light on the causal mechanisms leading animals to seek and consume more food under uncertainty in the wild. Our theoretical approach is in agreement with neuroscientific data relating to the role of dopamine, a neurotransmitter strongly involved in incentive motivation, and its plausibility has received some explanatory and predictive value with respect to Pavlovian phenomena. Overall, we argue that the occasional and unavoidable absence of food rewards has motivational effects that facilitate foraging effort. We show that this hypothesis is computationally tenable, leading foragers in an unpredictable environment to consume more food items and to have higher long-term energy storage than foragers in a predictable environment. (shrink)