How people forage in space and mind

Peter M. Todd

Provost Professor of Cognitive Science, Psychology, and Informatics

Indiana University, Bloomington

How do we decide when to search for something better and when to stick with what we’ve got?  People and other organisms must adaptively trade off between exploring and exploiting their environment to obtain the resources they need.  This applies to whatever space they are searching, including external spatial environments, looking for patches of food, and internal information environments, seeking concepts in memory. Similar evolved underlying mechanisms may be used to address the explore/exploit tradeoff in each domain and lead people to behave as predicted by theories of foraging.  In this talk, I will describe how we are studying connections between spatial search and cognitive search in a range of spaces and a range of intelligent agents.