Cognitive Science Research Talk: Inquiry as Foraging

College of Science Cognitive Science Research Talk
Inquiry as Foraging

Dr. David Barack
Research Associate
Department of Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract:
From the mundane to the esoteric, humans pursue knowledge to learn about their worlds by making a series of decisions to gather information. Making a series of decisions to gather resources is at the heart of foraging, a core competence essential to all mobile organisms. I argue that the parallel between inquiry and foraging provides new grounds for understanding inquiry. In this talk, I will analyze foraging, discuss how foraging extends to a range of cognitive activities including inquiry, and present behavioral and neural findings on mechanisms for foraging to learn about the environment. In a task based on the board game Battleship, humans and monkeys searched for shapes hidden on a grid. Behavioral analysis revealed that decisions to search new parts of the environment occur when the rates of information gain drop below the average, a signature of foraging. The degree to which these sequences matched foraging patterns predicted how quickly shapes were learned. Analysis and modeling of choice behavior on a second foraging task revealed important insights into how humans pursue both rewaard and information, even when making simple, reward-driven decisions. While monkeys played Battleship, neural activity was recorded in the prefrontal cortex, revealing that information about the shapes predicted changes in neural activity and neural responses in the region represent evidence about shape identity. The prefrontal cortex, then, represents the features of the world that must be inferred from gathering information and the evidence used to make those inferences. These findings shed new light on how we gather information during inquiry and illustrate how foraging is a scaffold for cognition.

Intended Audience:
Graduates, faculty, and staff.

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