Elisa Ciaramelli

TORONTO 2026

Neurobehavioral mechanisms of information foraging and memory

Deepu Murty

We are constantly faced with the decision to exploit current sources of information or to explore those that are new and uncertain. In this way, information seeking is fundamentally a foraging problem. Rather than studying these decisions in constrained laboratory paradigms (i.e., bandit tasks), the symposium examines information foraging as it unfolds in naturalistic settings, such as scrolling through social media, navigating news environments, and searching our memories. Across these contexts, how we forage has profound consequences: what we choose to engage with, and when, shapes what we ultimately remember.

First, Deepu Murty shows that novelty alone — independent of extrinsic reward — biases information foraging through hippocampal-mesolimbic engagement, and that doomscrollers show reduced novelty sensitivity. Next, Chris Honey reveals that the default mode network implements a generic context-updating mechanism across foraging, task, and event boundaries. Ian Ballard then demonstrates that social media cues engage neural patterns associated with social media during learning, with nucleus accumbens activation preceding switches away from learning. Finally, Alison Adcock shows that news foraging produces a negativity bias in memory — and that a simple reflection intervention can restore balance. Together, these studies reveal how the mechanisms governing information seeking shape lasting memory.