Abstract
Explore/exploit trade-offs are evolutionarily conserved and are readily observed in animals and humans. They occur within internally generated cognitive domains, such as memory search, as well as in physical foraging.Maladaptive explore/exploit trade-offs are beginning to receive attention as a factor in psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia.Individuals with schizophrenia may overuse random exploration strategies at the expense of directed exploration, resulting in explore/exploit behaviors that are misaligned with contextual or environmental cues.Aberrant dopamine signaling in schizophrenia could potentially result in maladaptive responses by altering explore/exploit behaviors.Mathematical models developed from optimal foraging theory may provide insights into how individuals with schizophrenia make explore/exploit decisions within dynamic environments.
Schizophrenia is a complex disorder that remains poorly understood, particularly at the systems level. In this opinion article we argue that the explore/exploit trade-off concept provides a holistic and ecologically valid framework to resolve some of the apparent paradoxes that have emerged within schizophrenia research. We review recent evidence suggesting that fundamental explore/exploit behaviors may be maladaptive in schizophrenia during physical, visual, and cognitive foraging. We also describe how theories from the broader optimal foraging literature, such as the marginal value theorem (MVT), could provide valuable insight into how aberrant processing of reward, context, and cost/effort evaluations interact to produce maladaptive responses.