Before revision:  We develop a theory of chemokinetic search agents that can detect the proximity of hidden targets and adapt their motility in a position-dependent manner. We show that residence probabilities are spatially homogeneous (after trivial renormalization), independent of strategy. Yet, a dynamic reflection effect allows search agents to substantially increase their target encounter rate if searchagents posses memory .
After revision:  We develop a theory of chemokinetic search agents that regulate directional fluctuations according to distance from a target. A dynamic scattering effect reduces the probability to penetrate regions with high fluctuations and thus search success for agents that respond instantaneously to positional cues. In contrast, agents with internal states that initially suppress chemokinesis can exploit scattering to increase their probability to find the target. Using matched asymptotics between the case of diffusive and ballistic search, we obtain analytic results beyond Fox' colored noise approximation .