Invited Speakers

Dr. David Barack 

Research Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania & Lingnan University

Title: Foraging: From Food to Inquiry

Abstract: The capacity to forage is central to all mobile organisms. Foraging is the search for resources of a general type, including food, minerals, social and sexual opportunities, and more, where the forager is ignorant of the specific location of their goal and is not searching for a specific item. Foragers make exclusive decisions between accepting and rejecting an item, where accepting or rejecting one item does not imply the acceptance or rejection of another. These items are persistent: when the item is rejected, it typically does not disappear but can be returned to. Further, foragers make these decisions repeatedly, coming across options in their environment and accepting or rejecting them. Foraging is the serial search for general resources in accept-or-reject, exclusive, persistent decision contexts. This analysis of foraging offers two promising payoffs. First, foraging presents special cognitive demands on organisms and, hence, on the evolution of decision mechanisms. I will assess the evidence for a specialized foraging circuit, arguing that much decision making results from foraging selective pressures placed on the brain. The consideration of these foraging choice mechanisms can explain suboptimal aspects of some decisions, such as violations of transitivity due to comparisons of offers to expectations instead of other items. Second, considering the selective demands from foraging yields novel explanation of types of cognition. Besides searching for resources in the environment, foragers can cognitively search for memories, ideas, reasons, and more. Specifically, inquiry is a type of foraging, requiring repeated accept or reject decisions in foraging-like internal environments. This offers a startling novel hypothesis for the origins of reasoning, inference, and other cognitive processes enlisted during inquiry: reasoning and inference evolved to keep track of progress during the goals of inquiry, using pre-existing cognitive machinery deployed in these new cognitive domains.

Dr. Aaron M. Bornstein 

Associate Professor in Cognitive Sciences, University of California

Dr. Dario Campagner 

Senior Research Fellow, University College London (UCL)

Title: Aeon: an open-source platform to study the neural basis of ethological behaviours over naturalistic timescales

Abstract: Ethological behaviours are a powerful tool for neuroscience since they leverage the robust neural computations shaped by the species’ evolution to study the neural basis of cognitive functions. However, such behaviours are often transitory and dependent on factors that vary over space, time and number of individuals, making them difficult to capture with standard laboratory tasks. Here we present Aeon, an open-source platform designed for continuous, long-term study of self-guided behaviours in multiple mice and simultaneous recording of brain activity within large, customizable habitats. By integrating specialized modules for navigation, nesting and sleeping, escaping, foraging, and social interaction, Aeon enables the expression of key ethological behaviours while achieving experimental control and multi-dimensional quantifications from sub-millisecond to month-long durations. Its software architecture ensures robust data acquisition via many synchronized data streams and delivers a new standardised, unified data format that yields seamless, integrated analysis pipelines. Using assays such as digging-to-threshold and social foraging, Aeon reveals how mice adapt strategies in a changing environment and in response to conspecifics. Aeon bridges ecological relevance with rigorous experimental control to advance our understanding of how neural circuit activity gives rise to a range of highly conserved and adaptive behaviours.

Prof. Becket Ebitz 

Assistant Professor, University of Montreal

Title: Exploration Under Uncertainty: Computational Insights from Childhood Adversity and Adolescence

Abstract: Computational accounts connect developmental experience to decision-making strategies. Our recent work applied patch-foraging paradigms with reinforcement learning models to test how exploration and reward learning are shaped across the lifespan. In adults, adverse childhood experiences predicted reduced exploration. Modelling revealed these individuals learned less from recent outcomes when estimating environmental reward rates, dampening their ability to exploit novel opportunities and leading to suboptimal reward accumulation. In complementary work, we examined how adolescents and adults adapt to changing reward rates. Adolescence, in particular, is an especially dynamic life stage that demands adaptation to volatility. Contrary to canonical assumptions, adaptation was not supported by higher learning rates. Instead, participants increased their decision stochasticity (more random exploration), which facilitated adjustment. Crucially, anxiety disrupted this stochastic exploration, highlighting a computational route through which psychopathology biases adaptive learning. Together, these findings feed into a theoretical framework in which heightened exploration in youth is not simply “risk-taking” but a developmental feature: it provides the experiential foundation for mature exploitative strategies. When this trajectory is perturbed—by early adversity or anxiety—individuals may miss critical learning opportunities, with consequences that persist into adulthood.

Prof. Elli Leadbeater 

Professor of Biodiversity and Ecosystems Research, University College London

Title: Ecology dictates the benefits of memory: an empirical case study in foraging bees

Abstract: Understanding the evolutionary origins of cognitive diversity across animal species requires examining how cognitive traits influence fitness within specific ecological contexts. Here, I will present a case study investigating how the relationship between memory and foraging efficiency shifts across environments in the buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris audax). Temperate social bees forage in landscapes that vary dramatically over time—from florally rich and diverse in spring to relatively sparse in summer- yet individual workers live for only around four weeks, experiencing just a snapshot of these seasonal dynamics. Over two years, we tested the memory performance of bees from standardized aseasonal lab-based colonies using a Radial Arm Maze (RAM) before releasing them to forage in the wild. We found that RAM performance predicted greater foraging efficiency—a key contributor to colony fitness—in plentiful spring conditions, but this relationship reversed during the summer floral dearth. These findings highlight the challenges of complex, option-rich environments as potentially important in shaping animal memory, but they raise intriguing questions about the underlying mechanistic drivers. I will conclude by discussing potential approaches to address these questions and their broader implications for understanding cognition in natural systems.

Dr. Jennifer Li 

Max Planck Research Group Leader, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics

Title: Brain-wide dynamics of time-limited foraging strategies in changing environments

Abstract: Effective foraging requires animals to continually assess environmental conditions and adjust behavior to balance food intake against energy expenditure. While many theoretical models of optimal foraging have been proposed, identifying their neural implementation across the brain has remained challenging. My lab develops technology to record cellular-resolution neural activity across the brain of freely moving larval zebrafish, providing a unique window into how innate foraging strategies are implemented at brain-wide scale.Using this approach, we previously showed that zebrafish spontaneously alternate between exploration and exploitation states even in constant environments with abundant prey, each associated with distinct global brain activity patterns (Marques et al., 2020). I will present new findings that external changes in prey density trigger exploration and exploitation states of precisely timed duration. Computational modeling indicates that such time-limited responses optimize the balance between food intake and energy costs. Finally, although larval zebrafish prey capture is typically viewed as vision-driven, we find that olfactory detection of prey density change is the primary driver of global state transitions. Together, these results demonstrate how the vertebrate brain can organize adaptive exploration–exploitation strategies through dynamic, time-limited brain states.

Prof. Dean Mobbs 

Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, California Institute of Technology

Dr. Carolina Rezaval 

Associate Professor, University of Birmingham

Title: Neural Circuit Basis for Foraging Under Conflict

Abstract: Animals must constantly arbitrate between competing drives, such as avoiding danger and pursuing reward. Foraging often presents such conflicts: approaching food can carry the risk of predation or injury. Yet how the brain integrates internal state with external cues to resolve these competing demands remains poorly understood.We tackle this challenge harnessing the neural circuit tractability of Drosophila and a novel behavioural assay where flies must decide whether to cross an aversive barrier to access food. We find that starvation biases flies towards risk-taking, but only when food is perceptible. In the absence of sensory cues, even hungry flies avoid danger, revealing that internal drive alone is insufficient to trigger action.Using behaviour, neurogenetics, and in vivo imaging, we identify a neural circuit mechanism that integrates motivational state and environmental cues to guide adaptive decision-making. This work reveals how the brain resolves fundamental survival conflicts and provides a tractable platform to uncover conserved principles of foraging under conflict.

Dr. David Robbe 

INSERM research director, Institut de Neurobiologie de la Méditerranée (INMED), INSERM, Aix-Marseille Université

Alexander Schakowski

Predoctoral Fellow, Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Title: The behavioral mechanisms underlying human social foraging dynamics in the wild

Abstract: Humans have mastered diverse foraging styles in extreme habitats from the tropics to the Arctic across a range of social settings. The unique complexity of the human foraging niche is considered a main driver of the evolution of cognition and social learning skills. Yet, the mechanisms underlying social foraging decisions (such as where to go and when to leave) in the real world remain unknown as existing field studies typically focus on individual-level behavior. Integrating high-precision GPS tracking and video footage from large-scale ice-fishing competitions in Finland with cognitive-computational modeling and agent-based simulations, we show how foragers integrate personal information (e.g., foraging success) with social information (e.g., the location of other foragers) to guide spatial search and patch-leaving decisions. We find, that foragers adaptively rely on social information to locate resources when unsuccessful and extend giving-up-times in the presence of others, resulting in increased area-restricted search at high social densities. These findings demonstrate the importance of sociality for human foraging decisions, and provide a template for harnessing high-resolution tracking data to study real-world cognition.

Dr. Jacquie Scholl