Alternative female and male developmental strategies in the dynamic balance of human visual perception

Abstract Choosing between alternatives is the stuff of everyday life. Many choices require trades between competing objectives, such as between capitalizing on past experience (‘exploitation’) and updating this experience (‘exploration’). In visual perception, where speed is important, there are tensions between stability of appearance, sensitivity to visual detail, and exploration of fundamental alternatives. Presumably, a ‘sweet spot’ balancing these objectives attains the highest degree of adaptive function. Here, we employ a no-report binocular rivalry paradigm combined with stochastic dynamic modeling to estimate how the visual system balances the objectives of stability, sensitivity, and exploration through-out the lifespan. Observed and simulated results reveal characteristic age- and sex-specific developmental and maturational lifespan trajectories that quantify important aspects of our neurocognitive phenotype. As we also reveal aspects of atypical development underlying mental health disorders, our cognitive modeling may inspire the field of developmental computational psychiatry, in addition to developmental and evolutionary cognitive neuroscience.