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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 ArticleDOI
TL;DR: It is suggested that chimpanzee and human personality develop via an unfolding maturational process and male chimpanzees were rated as more aggressive, emotional, and impulsive than females.
Abstract: Ratings of 202 chimpanzees on 43 personality descriptor adjectives were used to calculate scores on five domains analogous to the human Five-Factor Model and a chimpanzee-specific Dominance domain. Male and female chimpanzees were divided into five age groups ranging from juvenile to old adult. Internal consistencies and interrater reliabilities of factors were stable across age groups and approximately 6.8 year retest reliabilities were high. Age-related declines in Extraversion and Openness and increases in Agreeableness and Conscientiousness paralleled human age differences. The mean change in absolute standardized units for all five factors was virtually identical in humans and chimpanzees after adjustment for different developmental rates. Consistent with their aggressive behavior in the wild, male chimpanzees were rated as more aggressive, emotional, and impulsive than females. Chimpanzee sex differences in personality were greater than comparable human gender differences. These findings suggest that chimpanzee and human personality develop via an unfolding maturational process. Language: en

107 citations


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

  • ...Regarding non-human primates, there is evidence for reductions in attentiveness to a novel task (Kendal et al., 2005) and ratings of extraversion and openness with increased age (Weiss et al., 2007; King et al., 2008)....

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  • ..., 2005) and ratings of extraversion and openness with increased age (Weiss et al., 2007; King et al., 2008)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
01 Mar 2007-Oikos
TL;DR: This work examines how foragers may benefit from utilizing a simple learning rule to update estimates of temporal changes in resource levels, in the model which assumes initial expectation of resource conditions and rate of replacing past information by new experiences are genetically inherited traits.
Abstract: The acquisition of information is a fundamental part of individual foraging behaviour in heterogeneous and changing environments. We examine how foragers may benefit from utilizing a simple learning rule to update estimates of temporal changes in resource levels. In the model, initial expectation of resource conditions and rate of replacing past information by new experiences are genetically inherited traits. Patch-time allocation differs between learners and foragers that use a fixed patch-leaving threshold throughout the foraging season. It also deviates from foragers that obtain information about the environment at no cost. At the start of a foraging season, learners sample the environment by frequent movements between patches, sacrificing current resource intake for information acquisition. This is done to obtain more precise and accurate estimates of resource levels, resulting in increased intake rates later in season. Risk of mortality may alter the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation and thus change patch sampling effort. As lifetime expectancy decreases, learners invest less in information acquisition and show lower foraging performance when resource level changes through time.

106 citations


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

  • ...When such a general principle is translated into an agent’s life span, one can predict that reducing exploration with increased age/experience is adaptive (Eliassen et al., 2007)....

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  • ...…may be expected, involving significant risk taking and exploration early in life and increased exploitation later in life when proximity to death is near and the advantages of exploring the environment for future exploitation are smaller (Carstensen, 2006; Eliassen et al., 2007; Wang et al., 2009)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This work hypothesizes that priming should require search in the sense of a self-regulated making and testing of sequential predictions about the world and provides a mechanism for the underlying search process and investigates 3 alternative hypotheses for subgoal hierarchies using the central executive as a search process model (CESP).
Abstract: The trade-off between exploration and exploitation is common to a wide variety of problems involving search in space and mind. The prevalence of this trade-off and its neurological underpinnings led us to propose domain-general cognitive search processes (Hills, Todd, & Goldstone, 2008). We propose further that these are consistent with the idea of a central executive search process that combines goal-handling across subgoal hierarchies. In the present study, we investigate 3 aspects of this proposal. First, the existence of a unitary central executive search process should allow priming from 1 search task to another and at multiple hierarchical levels. We confirm this by showing cross-domain priming from a spatial search task to 2 different cognitive levels within a lexical search task. Second, given the neural basis of the proposed generalized cognitive search process and the evidence that the central executive is primarily engaged during complex tasks, we hypothesize that priming should require search in the sense of a self-regulated making and testing of sequential predictions about the world. This was confirmed by showing that when participants were allowed to collect spatial resources without searching for them, no priming occurred. Finally, we provide a mechanism for the underlying search process and investigate 3 alternative hypotheses for subgoal hierarchies using the central executive as a search process model (CESP). CESP envisions the central executive as having both emergent and unitary processes, with one of its roles being a generalized cognitive search process that navigates goal hierarchies by mediating persistence on and switching between subgoals.

104 citations


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

  • ...Second, there is evidence for cross-domain priming; exploration in a visualspatial search task primes exploration in a lexical task (Hills et al., 2010)....

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  • ...…interest and progress of late in understanding the cognitive and neural basis of foraging www.frontiersin.org April 2013 | Volume 7 | Article 53 | 1 decisions (Pirolli and Card, 1999; Cohen et al., 2007; Payne et al., 2007; Hills et al., 2010, 2012; Hayden et al., 2011; Kolling et al., 2012)....

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  • ...…could further elucidate the generality of foraging mechanisms would be to test for differential aging effects on exploration in different domains, such as visual search (Cain et al., 2012), search in space (Hills et al., 2010), memory (Hills et al., 2012), or information (Pirolli and Card, 1999)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used longitudinal data from repeated observations of individually-known wolves (Canis lupus) hunting elk (Cervus elaphus) in Yellowstone National Park to demonstrate that adult predatory performance declines with age and that an increasing ratio of senescent individuals in the wolf population depresses the rate of prey offtake.
Abstract: Ecology Letters (2009) 12: 1347–1356 Abstract It is well established that ageing handicaps the ability of prey to escape predators, yet surprisingly little is known about how ageing affects the ability of predators to catch prey. Research into long-lived predators has assumed that adults have uniform impacts on prey regardless of age. Here we use longitudinal data from repeated observations of individually-known wolves (Canis lupus) hunting elk (Cervus elaphus) in Yellowstone National Park to demonstrate that adult predatory performance declines with age and that an increasing ratio of senescent individuals in the wolf population depresses the rate of prey offtake. Because this ratio fluctuates independently of population size, predatory senescence may cause wolf populations of equal size but different age structure to have different impacts on prey populations. These findings suggest that predatory senescence is an important, though overlooked, factor affecting predator-prey dynamics.

100 citations


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

  • ...An important conclusion from such work is that physical decline can account for a large portion of age-related decline in performance, a general result that matches similar findings from the non-human literature (MacNulty et al., 2009; Zimmer et al., 2011)....

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  • ...An important conclusion from such work is that physical decline can account for a large portion of age-related decline in performance, a general result that matches similar findings from the non-human literature (MacNulty et al., 2009; Zimmer et al., 2011)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article found that exploration and innovation are positively correlated with age, perhaps reflecting adults' greater manipulative competence, and to the extent that there was evidence for play in younger individuals, it did not appear to contribute to innovation.
Abstract: The prevailing assumption in the primate literature is that young or juvenile primates are more innovative than adult individuals. This innovative tendency among the young is frequently thought to be a consequence, or side effect, of their increased rates of exploration and play. Conversely, Reader and Laland's [International Journal of Primatology 22:787-806, 2001] review of the primate innovation literature noted a greater reported incidence of innovation in adults than nonadults, which they interpreted as (in part) a reflection of the greater experience and competence of older individuals. Within callitrichids there is contradictory evidence for age differences in response to novel objects, foods, and foraging tasks. By presenting novel extractive foraging tasks to family groups of callitrichid monkeys in zoos, we examined, in a large sample, whether there are positive or negative relationships of age with neophilia, exploration, and innovation, and whether play or experience most facilitates innovation. The results indicate that exploration and innovation (but not neophilia) are positively correlated with age, perhaps reflecting adults' greater manipulative competence. To the extent that there was evidence for play in younger individuals, it did not appear to contribute to innovation. The implications of these findings for the fields of innovation and conservation through reintroduction are considered.

100 citations