They don’t really. People have different thresholds for acceptable exploration costs and heuristics for approximating those costs (as well as the opportunity co

They don’t really. People have different thresholds for acceptable exploration costs and heuristics for approximating those costs (as well as the opportunity cost of alternative courses of action). IMO, in biological systems the explore vs exploit tradeoff is pretty analogous to the halting problem. There doesn’t seem to be an optimal general “solution” to it. Once an organism is very familiar with its environment it’ll approximate near-optimal trade offs, which would suggest it’s just using heuristics.