Learning & Memory/Cognitive 

Abstract: Animals often search for resources that occur in spatial patches, such as berries on a bush or nuts beneath trees. Humans also search for cognitive resources that can be seen as occurring in memorial patches, such as names, category exemplars, solutions to problems, etc. In spatial environments, adaptive foraging involves making appropriate global transitions between locally exploited resource clusters: decisions that prevent animals from staying too long in over-exploited patches, and from giving up too early on patches full of resources yet to be found. To explore strategies of cognitive search, I will present a combination of experimental and computational work converging on the hypothesis that strategies for optimal spatial search (e.g., for food) may have been subsequently exapted for search of information resources in memory. Applications of the model for early identification of individuals with memory impairments (e.g., Alzheimer’s Disease) will be discussed.