"Deciding whether to give up on a course of action or persist in
the hope that our efforts will pay off is a crucial but hard problem to
define and optimize. What information is best to take into account? What
returns justify the costs? What are the costs and benefits of taking an
alternative course of action? Considering all these questions
simultaneously seems hard, yet, animals routinely solve this conundrum
while foraging.
Using behavioral, computational and neuronal activity
manipulation techniques, in this thesis, we investigate how the brain
solves this problem. Specifically, we aim to deepen our understanding of
two aspects: how the agent represents the environment in order to
extract information suitable to guide its foraging decisions, and how
serotonin activity can bidirectionally modulate this decision process.(...)
