ePoster · Cognition
Humans forage for reward in classic reinforcement learning tasks
Meriam Zid, Veldon-James Laurie, Alix Levine-Champagne, Akram Shourkeshti, Dameon Harrell, Alexander B Herman, Becket Ebitz · COSYNE 2025
Because the world is dynamic and only imperfectly observable, many of the decisions we make are necessarily uncertain. How do we navigate such uncertainty? From the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, the classic answer would be that we evaluate the benefits of each potential choice and then lean towards the one promising the greatest reward, modulo some exploratory noise. Conversely, an ethologist would argue that we would stay with previously rewarding choices until the payout drops below a certain threshold, at which point we start exploring other options. While both hypotheses wield con