Considering the variety of animals that seem to show this behavior, isn't it possible that mammals, specifically humans, are "encoded" with that same random search pattern? I'm not sure how you'd test for it though.
I instantly thought about eye tracking experiments, in which we see lots of small movements around an area, then big jumps across the screen. I guess others have thought about it too.
> Specifically, we use comparisons of maximum-likelihood fit as well as standard deviation analysis and diffusion entropy analysis to show that visual search during language comprehension exhibits Lévy-like rather than Gaussian diffusion.
That is fascinating. Thanks for that.
> However, one could argue, from an evolutionary standpoint, that spe-ciÿc search mechanisms could have been learned and “wired” in order to improve theexploration eciency (e.g., if a salient point is located within a direct vision distance,maximize the probability of straightforwardly moving to that site)
https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.79.05...
https://www.academia.edu/1112368/Modelling_gaze_shift_as_a_c...
I'm intrigued.