June 12 @ 11:00 am – 12:00 pm
NBB Seminar Series
Friday, June 12th, 2026 at 11:00am
The seminar will be In-Person.
Aaron Bornstein, PhD
Associate Professor, Cognitive Sciences, School of Social Sciences, UC Irvine
The role of learning and memory in foraging decisions by humans across health and disease
Abstract:
Humans and animals are often maligned as being bad (“suboptimal”) at making decisions, especially decisions under uncertainty. But is this allegation justified? This talk will focus on a set of measurements from the domain of patch foraging. Foraging requires individuals to compare a local option to the distribution of alternatives across the environment. Foragers, across a range of species, have been observed to systematically deviate from exogenous notions of optimality by “overharvesting”—staying too long in a patch. I introduce a computational model that explains the appearance of overharvesting as a by-product of two mechanisms: 1) statistically rational learning about the distribution of alternatives and 2) decisions that adapt to the uncertainty of these distributions – looking ahead farther when more sure about the options available. I test this model using a variant of a serial stay-leave task and find that human foragers’ behavior is consistent with both mechanisms. Our findings suggest that overharvesting, rather than reflecting a deviation from optimal decision-making, is instead a consequence of optimal learning and adaptation. I then present new work following up on these findings to understand how individuals adapt to their environments, experiences, and changing neural circuitry across the lifespan.