The vast majority of the tasks used to study the function of the ACC have relied on situations which have limited possibilities of response and a single well-defined outcome. In the controlled, pre-programmed environment of the laboratory, it is straightforward for researchers to determine what the correct response to make is and to judge a participant's behaviour accordingly. All the studies described thus far in the present review have involved situations in which uncertainty is experimentally induced by switching the contingencies between actions and their consequences, which take a step towards mimicking more realistically variable situations. However, in more naturalistic settings, desirable outcomes are often dynamically uncertain, altering as a function of the patterns of choices previously made by both you and other organisms in the environment. For a foraging animal, it is important to decide when is optimal to move on from a patch of food, as continued exploitation will over time deplete the resource making its payoff potentially less valuable than other options (Charnov, 1976; Stephens and Krebs, 1986). Moreover, even when having located a fruitful source of
