To test this yourself, you can gently hold your eyeball still with your fingers (through your lids, please!). If you are able to get a good, soft grip on your eye, cover the other eye, hold your head still, and the picture in front of your eyes will fade away because there is no new input.

This term comes from Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card’s “information foraging” research at Xerox PARC in which they drew parallels between people seeking information (“informavores”) and animals following the scent of their prey.