Related papers: Should I Stay or Should I Go: Coordinating Biologi…

In any ecosystem, the conditions of the environment and the characteristics of the species that inhabit it are entangled, co-evolving in space and time. We introduce a model that couples active agents with a dynamic environment, interpreted…

What drives an agent to explore the world while also maintaining control over the environment? From a child at play to scientists in the lab, intelligent agents must balance curiosity (the drive to seek knowledge) with competence (the drive…

We integrate dual-process theories of human cognition with evolutionary game theory to study the evolution of automatic and controlled decision-making processes. We introduce a model where agents who make decisions using either automatic or…

We explore how different types and uses of memory can aid spatial navigation in changing uncertain environments. In the simple foraging task we study, every day, our agent has to find its way from its home, through barriers, to food.…

Residential mobility is deeply entangled with all aspects of hunter-gatherer life ways, and is therefore an issue of central importance in hunter-gatherer studies. Hunter-gatherers vary widely in annual rates of residential mobility, and…

A generic property of biological, social and economical networks is their ability to evolve in time, creating and suppressing interactions. We approach this issue within the framework of an adaptive network of agents playing a Prisoner's…

A sequential decision-making agent balances between exploring to gain new knowledge about an environment and exploiting current knowledge to maximize immediate reward. For environments studied in the traditional literature, optimal…

We explore how physical scale and population size shape the emergence of complex behaviors in open-ended ecological environments. In our setting, agents are unsupervised and have no explicit rewards or learning objectives but instead evolve…

Popular hypotheses about the origins of collective adaptation are related to two basic behaviours: protection from predators and a combined search for food resources. Among the anti-predator explanations, the predator confusion hypothesis…

Active inference helps us simulate adaptive behavior and decision-making in biological and artificial agents. Building on our previous work exploring the relationship between active inference, well-being, resilience, and sustainability, we…

Predators often consume multiple prey and by mutually subsidizing a shared predator, the prey may reciprocally harm each other. When predation levels are high, this apparent competition can culminate in a prey species being displaced.…

Thanks to recent technological advances, it is now possible to track with an unprecedented precision and for long periods of time the movement patterns of many living organisms in their habitat. The increasing amount of data available on…

We develop a mathematical model of extinction and coexistence in a generic predator-prey ecosystem composed of two herbivores in asymmetrical competition and a hunter exerting a predatory pressure on both species. With the aim of…

The distribution of information is essential for living system's ability to coordinate and adapt. Random walkers are often used to model this distribution process and, in doing so, one effectively assumes that information maintains its…

In this paper we study the long term dynamics of two prey species and one predator species. In the deterministic setting, if we assume the interactions are of Lotka-Volterra type (competition or predation), the long term behavior of this…

Dormancy is a widespread adaptive strategy that enables populations to persist in fluctuating environments, yet how its benefits depend on the temporal structure of environmental variability remains unclear. We examine how dormancy…

Ecology and evolution are inseparable. Motivated by some recent experiments, we have developed models of evolutionary ecology from the perspective of dynamic networks. In these models, in addition to the intra-node dynamics, which…

Resource competition is a fundamental interaction in natural communities.However little is known about competition in spatial environments where organisms are able to regulate resource distributions. Here, we analyze the competition of two…

Drawing on the understanding of the logistic map, we propose a simple predator-prey model where predators and prey adapt to each other, leading to the co-evolution of the system. The special dynamics observed in periodic windows contribute…

We present a model for a random walk with memory, phenomenologically inspired in a biological system. The walker has the capacity to remember the time of the last visit to each site and the step taken from there. This memory affects the…