CNU professor discusses 'foraging' for parking
on statewide radio program
News Release - May 8, 2006
Media contact:
Karen L. Gill
Office of Communications and Public Relations
(757) 594-8428
(NEWPORT NEWS, Va.) — When it comes to looking for a parking space, people sometimes act like real apes.
That’s what Dr. Andrew Velkey II, an associate professor of psychology at Christopher Newport University, has learned through his research. But he’s also found that people use some other methods of “foraging” for a parking space that not even monkeys or rats resort to.
Velkey will discuss the foraging behavior of men and women drivers searching for parking spaces on “With Good Reason,” Virginia's only statewide radio show, airing on public radio stations May 6-12.
Statewide airtimes are available at www.withgoodreasonradio.org/stations.html.
In the Hampton Roads area, the show airs at 1 p.m., May 12, on 89.5 WHRV-Norfolk.
Velkey has found that in addition to drivers who move in, through, and out of a particular parking lot, some foragers enter a row in the lot then sit and wait for an occupied parking stall to be vacated, behavior that Velkey dubbed perching.
Velkey’s research also found men are more likely to enter a parking lot, park the vehicle, and cover the remaining terrain on foot, whereas women tend to enter a parking lot and actively search up and down rows before parking the vehicle and covering the same amount of terrain on foot (thus having longer hunting time and total time in the lot).
Velkey’s study of the foraging behavior of monkeys and rats in computer-controlled foraging environments led to his interest in determining how these models could be used in the study of “real world” phenomena.
After considering various human activities that involved the search for, selection, acquisition, and “consumption” of limited resources, he and his colleagues settled on the study of the movement of people in their cars as they hunted for a space in a campus parking lot. The parking lot can be considered a “patch” in which the driver “forages” for a parking space.
For more information about "With Good Reason," visit www.withgoodreasonradio.org.
Christopher Newport University is a four-year public university in Newport News, Virginia. CNU enrolls 4,800 students in programs through its College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the Luter School of Business and offers great teaching, small classes and an emphasis on leadership, civic engagement and honor. Visit us at www.cnu.edu.