Foraging for foundations in decision neuroscience: insights from ethology

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. In this Opinion article, Mobbs and colleagues argue that more should be done to combine the approaches taken in neuroscience with those taken in ethology and behavioural ecology to study decision-making. They illustrate how this has been achieved in the context of studies on foraging.