The ubiquity of opportunity cost: Foraging and beyond
Schedule
Wednesday, March 30, 2022
05:00 UTC
Nathaniel Daw
Prof
Princeton University
Host: Future of Foraging
Recording
Open recording
Event Information
Recording
Available
Host
Future of Foraging
Duration
70 minutes
Abstract
A key insight from the foraging literature is the importance of assessing the overall environmental quality — via global reward rate or similar measures, which capture the opportunity cost of time and can guide behavioral allocation toward relatively richer options. Meanwhile, the majority of research in decision neuroscience and computational psychiatry has focused instead on how choices are guided by much more local, event-locked evaluations: of individual situations, actions, or outcomes. I review a combination of research and theoretical speculation from my lab and others that emphasizes the role of foraging's average rewards and opportunity costs in a much larger range of decision problems, including risk, time discounting, vigor, cognitive control, and deliberation. The broad range of behaviors affected by this type of evaluation gives a new theoretical perspective on the effects of stress and autonomic mobilization, and on mood and the broad range of symptoms associated with mood disorders.
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