Foraging

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

…concurrently available resources when foraging, a complex decision-making process not fully captured by existing models. To understand how animals learn to navigate this challenge we developed a novel paradigm in which untrained, water-restricted mice were free to sample from six options rewarded at a range of deterministic intervals and positioned around the walls of a large arena. Combining core features of quantitative models of foraging and decision-making, we developed a novel reinforcement learning (

Our understanding of the hippocampus has been framed by two landmark discoveries: the discovery by Scoville and Milner that hippocampal damage causes profound and persistent amnesia and the discovery by O’Keefe and Dostrovsky of hippocampal place cells in rodents. However, it has been unclear to what extent spatial representations are present in the primate brain and how to reconcile these representations with the known mnemonic function of this region. I will discuss a series of experiments that have examined neural activity in the hippocampus in monkeys performing behavioral tasks including

All living beings face the universal challenge of foraging (i.e. finding and consuming energy sources while balancing overall energy expenditure). Impressively, in precocial animals such as larval zebrafish, evolutionarily embedded innate neural programs are able to overcome this challenge with no parental guidance and limited learning ability. Previous studies have highlighted the internally driven spontaneous alternation between long-lasting exploration or exploitation states (Flavell et al., 2013; Martin, Ernst, & Heisenberg, 1999, Marques et al., 2020). We aim to understand how these i

Many insect species maintain a nest around which their foraging behaviour is centered, and can use path integration to maintain an accurate estimate of their distance and direction (a vector) to their nest. Some species, such as bees and ants, can also store the vector information for multiple salient locations in the world, such as food sources, in a common coordinate system. They can also use remembered views of the terrain around salient locations or along travelled routes to guide return. Recent modelling of these abilities shows convergence on a small set of algorithms and assumptions tha

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 t

Foraging research aims at describing, understanding, and predicting resource-gathering behaviour. Optimal Foraging Theory (OFT) is a sub-discipline that emphasises that these aims can be aided by segmenting foraging behaviour into discrete problems that can be formally described and examined with mathematical maximization techniques. Examples of such segmentation are found in the isolated treatment of issues such as patch residence time, prey selection, information gathering, risky choice, intertemporal decision making, resource allocation, competition, memory updating, group structure, and so

Understanding what drives foraging decisions in animals requires careful manipulation of the value of available options while monitoring animal choices. Value-based decision-making tasks, in combination with formal learning models, have provided both an experimental and theoretical framework to study foraging decisions in lab settings. While these approaches were successfully used in the past to understand what drives choices in mammals, very little work has been done on fruit flies. This is even though fruit flies have served as a model organism for many complex behavioural paradigms. To fill