Understanding patch foraging strategies across development.

From adolescence to adulthood, there is a decrease in exploration choices in foraging decision-making problems. In youth, a disposition to explore when faced with explore/exploit choices can support the individual to learn the structure of their environment, enabling them to effectively exploit rewards in maturity. Such age-related differences are likely driven by neurocognitive changes to reward processing, learning, and cognitive control across development. Individual differences in foraging strategies can be indicative of cognitive biases implicated in mental health outcomes. Patch foraging is a near-ubiquitous behaviour across the animal kingdom and characterises many decision-making domains encountered by humans. We review how a disposition to explore in adolescence may reflect the evolutionary conditions under which hunter-gatherers foraged for resources. We propose that neurocomputational mechanisms responsible for reward processing, learning, and cognitive control facilitate the transition from exploratory strategies in adolescence to exploitative strategies in adulthood – where individuals capitalise on known resources. This developmental transition may be disrupted by psychopathology, as there is emerging evidence of biases in explore/exploit choices in mental health problems. Explore/exploit choices may be an informative marker for mental health across development and future research should consider this feature of decision-making as a target for clinical intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]