Forensic foraging of change detection in opponent strategies with a neural model of the interactions between temporal and prefrontal cortex

Change detection, and which information to attend to, are key research problems relevant to understanding adaptive behavior. Rational analyses of change detection have been developed in optimal foraging theory (McNamara and Houston, 1987 and Stephens, 1987) and psychology (Gallistel, Krishan, Liu, Miller, & Latham, 2014). Information foraging models (Pirolli, 2007) have been developed to predict the optimal choice of information, and when to terminate collecting additional information. Optimal performance depend crucially on changing behavior when the world changes. For example, intelligence analysts track the dynamically changing strategies of adversaries and must choose information to weigh the utility of alternate actions regarding these agents. Neurobiologically-plausible descriptions of these behaviors have thus far been fragmentary (cf., Hayden, Pearson, & Platt, 2011). Here, behavioral and mechanistic differences in belief updating about an agent’s strategy, and information foraging choices were investigated in a variant of the patch foraging task. Human subjects typically displayed non-normative updating and information foraging decisions which influenced future belief updating and foraging behaviors. To explore the biological basis of these behaviors, a neural model which forages, processes, and updates the beliefs of competing hypotheses was created. Strategy updating and information foraging behaviors were modeled in the temporal and prefrontal cortices consistent with theories of human cognitive processing during adversarial game play. The neural model reproduced human behaviors observed in foraging, belief updating, and change detection. These results highlight the importance of updating strategy, foraging, and fatigue behaviors and provide a simulation framework for future studies to investigate other high-level cognitive behaviors.