A lecture by Peter M. Todd, Provost Professor of Cognitive Science, Psychology, and Informatics at Indiana University

How do we decide when to search for something better and when to stick with what we’ve got? People and other organisms must adaptively trade off between exploring and exploiting their environment to obtain the resources they need. This applies to whatever space they are searching: whether the external spatial environment, looking for patches of food; the internal information environment, seeking concepts in memory; or the cultural artifact environment, looking for goods or entertainment. Similar evolved underlying mechanisms may be used to address the explore/exploit tradeoff in each domain and lead people to behave as predicted by theories of foraging. In this talk, Professor Todd will describe how we are studying connections between spatial search and cognitive search in a range of spaces, and how these may apply to intelligent agents anywhere.

Peter M. Todd investigates the cognitive mechanisms that people use to make decisions about adaptively important resources in space and time. He received a PhD in psychology from Stanford University and co-founded the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. He is the author of Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart; Ecological Rationality: Intelligence in the World; and Cognitive Search: Evolution, Algorithms, and the Brain.