ePoster · Computational Neuroscience
ForageWorld: RL agents in complex foraging arenas develop internal maps for navigation and planning
Ryan Badman, Riley Simmons-Edler, Felix Berg, Joshua Lunger, John Vastola, William Qian, Kanaka Rajan · COSYNE 2025
Foraging, the set of behaviors associated with seeking valuable resources (e.g., food, water) while avoiding danger (e.g., predators), is ubiquitous among organisms, but its neural circuit basis is presently unclear. Most existing work on navigation, a key component of foraging, involves animals in small, fully observable arenas with few-to-no obstacles, partly because recording neural activity in naturalistic settings is challenging. How do animals successfully forage in complex naturalistic environments, especially given realistic neural circuit constraints on capacity and connectivity? To s