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Foraging for foundations in decision neuroscience: insights from ethology

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 19, pages 419–427 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

Modern decision neuroscience offers a powerful and broad account of human behaviour using computational techniques that link psychological and neuroscientific approaches to the ways that individuals can generate near-optimal choices in complex controlled environments. However, until recently, relatively little attention has been paid to the extent to which the structure of experimental environments relates to natural scenarios, and the survival problems that individuals have evolved to solve. This situation not only risks leaving decision-theoretic accounts ungrounded but also makes various aspects of the solutions, such as hard-wired or Pavlovian policies, difficult to interpret in the natural world. Here, we suggest importing concepts, paradigms and approaches from the fields of ethology and behavioural ecology, which concentrate on the contextual and functional correlates of decisions made about foraging and escape and address these lacunae.

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Fig. 1: Example of classic apple-picking task.
Fig. 2: Example of foraging and escape choice, and the cost-of-fleeing and cost-of-staying curves.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank T. Akam and the reviewers for their very stimulating comments. This work was supported by US National Institute of Mental Health grant 2P50MH094258 and a Chen Institute Award (P2026052) (support to D.M.), the Gatsby Charitable Foundation (support to P.D.) and the US National Science Foundation (support to D.T.B. and P.C.T.; P.C.T. was supported by an Integrative Organismal System grant (1456724) to A. Sih). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the authors’ funders.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Humanities and Social Sciences and Computation and Neural Systems Program at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Dean Mobbs

  2. Department of Environmental Science and Policy, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA

    Pete C. Trimmer

  3. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Daniel T. Blumstein

  4. Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London, London, UK

    Peter Dayan

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D.M., P.C.T., D.T.B. and P.D. researched data for the article, made substantial contributions to discussions of the content, wrote the article and reviewed and/or edited the manuscript before submission.

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Mobbs, D., Trimmer, P.C., Blumstein, D.T. et al. Foraging for foundations in decision neuroscience: insights from ethology. Nat Rev Neurosci 19, 419–427 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-018-0010-7

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