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Journal ArticleDOI

Foraging across the life span: is there a reduction in exploration with aging?

17 Apr 2013-Frontiers in Neuroscience (Frontiers)-Vol. 7, pp 53-53
TL;DR: Overall, the evidence suggests that foraging behavior may undergo significant changes across the life span across internal and external search, and finds evidence of a trend toward reduced exploration with increased age.
Abstract: Does foraging change across the life span, and in particular, with aging? We report data from two foraging tasks used to investigate age differences in search in external environments as well as internal search in memory. Overall, the evidence suggests that foraging behavior may undergo significant changes across the life span across internal and external search. In particular, we find evidence of a trend towards reduced exploration with increased age. We discuss these findings in light of theories that postulate a link between aging and reductions in novelty seeking and exploratory behavior.

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jul 2015
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore how potential tradeoffs depend on the conceptualization of exploration and exploitation, the influencing environmental, social, and individual factors, the scale at which exploration and exploit are considered, the relationship and types of transitions between the two behaviors, and the goals of the decision maker.
Abstract: Many decisions in the lives of animals and humans require a fine balance between the exploration of different options and the exploitation of their rewards. Do you buy the advertised car, or do you test drive different models? Do you continue feeding from the current patch of flowers, or do you fly off to another one? Do you marry your current partner, or try your luck with someone else? The balance required in these situations is commonly referred to as the exploration– exploitation tradeoff. It features prominently in a wide range of research traditions, including learning, foraging, and decision making literatures. Here, we integrate findings from these and other often-isolated literatures in order to gain a better understand- ing of the possible tradeoffs between exploration and exploitation, and we propose new theoretical insights that might guide future research. Specifically, we explore how potential tradeoffs depend on (a) the conceptualization of exploration and exploitation; (b) the influencing environmental, social, and individual factors; (c) the scale at which exploration and exploitation are considered; (d) the relationship and types of transitions between the 2 behaviors; and (e) the goals of the decision maker. We conclude that exploration and exploitation are best conceptualized as points on a continuum, and that the extent to which an agent’s behavior can be interpreted as exploratory or exploitative depends upon the level of abstraction at which it is considered.

234 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
04 Nov 1988-Science

221 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This review examines how age-related brain changes influence processes such as attending to and remembering emotional stimuli, regulating emotion, and recognizing emotional expressions, as well as empathy, risk taking, impulsivity, behavior change, and attentional focus.
Abstract: Although aging is associated with clear declines in physical and cognitive processes, emotional functioning fares relatively well. Consistent with this behavioral profile, two core emotional brain regions, the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, show little structural and functional decline in aging, compared with other regions. However, emotional processes depend on interacting systems of neurotransmitters and brain regions that go beyond these structures. This review examines how age-related brain changes influence processes such as attending to and remembering emotional stimuli, regulating emotion, and recognizing emotional expressions, as well as empathy, risk taking, impulsivity, behavior change, and attentional focus.

208 citations


Cites result from "Foraging across the life span: is t..."

  • ...Not much is known yet about how age-related changes in the LC-noradrenaline system might relate to the likelihood of exploring new options versus remaining fixated on current choices, but it is an interesting avenue for future research, especially given findings of less exploratory behavior (Mata et al. 2013) and less information seeking during decision making (Mather 2006) among older than younger adults....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The aim of the review is to promote the view that predators do not simply learn to avoid aposematic prey, but rather make adaptive decisions about both when to gather information about defended prey and when to include them in their diets.
Abstract: The question, "Why should prey advertise their presence to predators using warning coloration?" has been asked for over 150 years. It is now widely acknowledged that defended prey use conspicuous or distinctive colors to advertise their toxicity to would-be predators: a defensive strategy known as aposematism. One of the main approaches to understanding the ecology and evolution of aposematism and mimicry (where species share the same color pattern) has been to study how naive predators learn to associate prey’s visual signals with the noxious effects of their toxins. However, learning to associate a warning signal with a defense is only one aspect of what predators need to do to enable them to make adaptive foraging decisions when faced with aposematic prey and their mimics. The aim of our review is to promote the view that predators do not simply learn to avoid aposematic prey, but rather make adaptive decisions about both when to gather information about defended prey and when to include them in their diets. In doing so, we reveal what surprisingly little we know about what predators learn about aposematic prey and how they use that information when foraging. We highlight how a better understanding of predator cognition could advance theoretical and empirical work in the field.

107 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The explore/exploit trade-off has been studied extensively in behavioral ecology and computational neuroscience, but is relatively new to the field of psychiatry as discussed by the authors, which can offer psychiatry research a new approach to studying motivation, outcome valuation, and effort-related processes which are disrupted in many mental and emotional disorders.

102 citations

References
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Journal Article
TL;DR: A word search puzzle paradigm was used to examine the effects of task environment and individual differences in ability on information foraging and suggest that individuals may differentially optimize information gain through self-regulation of exploration and exploitation.

5 citations


"Foraging across the life span: is t..." refers background in this paper

  • ...Suitable tasks may include information search tasks that use switching between options (Daw et al., 2006), cues (Hills et al., 2013), or problems (Chin et al., 2012) as indicators of exploration....

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  • ...One study investigated age differences in information foraging by asking younger and older adults to find words from word puzzles with the goal of maximizing the total number of words found within a limited time period (Chin et al., 2012)....

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