In many everyday decisions, individuals choose between trialling something novel or
something they know well. Deciding when to try a new option or stick with an option that is …

Humans may retrieve words from memory by exploring and exploiting in “semantic space”
similar to how nonhuman animals forage for resources in physical space. This has been …

Maternal immune activation (MIA) during pregnancy increases the risk for the unborn foetus
to develop neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism spectrum disorder and …

The ubiquity, importance, and sophistication of foraging behavior makes it an ideal platform
for studying naturalistic decision making in animals. We developed a spatial patch-foraging …

Foraging theory has been a remarkably successful approach to understanding the behavior
of animals in many contexts. In patch-based foraging contexts, the marginal value theorem …

Explore-exploit research has challenges in generalizability due to a limited theoretical basis
of exploration and exploitation. Neuroimaging can help identify whether explore-exploit …

Our brain faces the dilemma of exploiting familiar options to gain immediate rewards or
exploring new options to increase probable future rewards, in many real-life decisions, and …

Any learning agent must balance between exploiting its knowledge and exploring new
alternatives. Schizophrenia patients are known to have maladaptive exploration-exploitation …

Cognitive and behavioral rigidity is observed across several mental disorders and is a
defining characteristic of Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD), a highly …

Infections in pregnancy are a risk factor for the unborn child to develop autism and
schizophrenia later in life. In this thesis, we investigated how infections in pregnancy impact …