“Vanilla, Vanilla .but what about Pistachio?” A Computational Cognitive Clinical Neuroscience Approach to the Exploration-Exploitation Dilemma

On the 24th November of 1859, Charles Darwin published the first edition of The Origin of Species. One hundred fifty-nine years later, our understanding of human and animal adaptation to the surrounding environment remains a major scientific challenge. How do humans and animals generate apt decision strategies in order to achieve this adaptation? How does their brain efficiently carry out complex computations in order to produce such adaptive behaviors? Although an exhaustive answer to these questions continues to feel out of reach, the investigation of adaptive processing results relevant in understanding mind/brain relationship and in elucidating scenarios where mind/brain interactions are corrupted such as in psychiatric disorders. Additionally, understanding how the brain efficiently scales problems when producing complex and adaptive behaviors can inspire and contribute to resolve Artificial Intelligence (AI) problems (e.g. scaling problems, generalization etc.) and consequently to the develop intelligent machines. During my PhD, I investigated adaptive behaviors at behavioral, cognitive, and neural level. I strongly believe that, as Marr already pointed out, in order to understand how our brain-machine works we need to investigate the phenomenon from 3 different levels: behavioral, algorithm and neural implementation. For this reason, throughout my doctoral work I took advantages of computational modeling methods together with cognitive neuroscience techniques in order to investigate the underlying mechanisms of adaptive behaviors.Doctorat en Sciences psychologiques et de l'éducation