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Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was among first to suggest that certain acquired traits may be heritable from parents to offspring. In this study, I examine whether and what aspects of sensorimotor conditioning by parents prior to conception may…
The animals, in particular insects (Drosophila melanogaster), response towards odor stimuli in nature can be established by measuring the dynamic of the odor response. Such an approach is innovative since responses to odors were tested only…
Living systems continually respond to signals from the surrounding environment. Survival requires that their responses adapt quickly and robustly to the changes in the environment. One particularly challenging example is olfactory…
This article provides a background and descriptive analysis of insect memory and the coding of olfactory sensation in Drosophila, presenting graphs and summary statistics from a large dataset of neurons and synapses that was recently made…
Animals smelling in the real world use a small number of receptors to sense a vast number of natural molecular mixtures, and proceed to learn arbitrary associations between odors and valences. Here, we propose a new interpretation of how…
Gene expression levels are important molecular quantitative traits that link genotypes to molecular functions and fitness. In Drosophila, population-genetic studies in recent years have revealed substantial adaptive evolution at the genomic…
In many species, genomic data have revealed pervasive adaptive evolution indicated by the fixation of beneficial alleles. However, when selection pressures are highly variable along a species range or through time adaptive alleles may…
We study subliminal learning, a surprising phenomenon where language models transmit behavioral traits via semantically unrelated data. In our main experiments, a "teacher" model with some trait T (such as liking owls or being misaligned)…
Understanding how animals make foraging decisions in challenging or unpleasant contexts sheds light on the processes that underlie cognitive development and the evolution of adaptive foraging techniques in complex ecological settings. In…
Lifelong development allows animals and machines to adapt to changes in the environment as well as in their own systems, such as wear and tear in sensors and actuators. An important use case of such adaptation is industrial odor-sensing.…
The mammalian olfactory system learns rapidly from very few examples, presented in unpredictable online sequences, and then recognizes these learned odors under conditions of substantial interference without exhibiting catastrophic…
Aging affects almost all aspects of an organism -- its morphology, its physiology, its behavior. Isolating which biological mechanisms are regulating these changes, however, has proven difficult, potentially due to our inability to…
Animals adjust their behavioral response to sensory input adaptively depending on past experiences. The flexible brain computation is crucial for survival and is of great interest in neuroscience. The nematode C. elegans modulates its…
People make strategic decisions many times a day - during negotiations, when coordinating actions with others, or when choosing partners for cooperation. The resulting dynamics can be studied with learning theory and evolutionary game…
Studies of insect olfactory processing indicate that odors are represented by rich spatio-temporal patterns of neural activity. These patterns are very difficult to predict a priori, yet they are stimulus specific and reliable upon repeated…
Animal behavior and neural recordings show that the brain is able to measure both the intensity of an odor and the timing of odor encounters. However, whether intensity or timing of odor detections is more informative for olfactory-driven…
The model of interaction between learning and evolutionary optimization is designed and investigated. The evolving population of modeled organisms is considered. The mechanism of the genetic assimilation of the acquired features during a…
Associating multiple sensory cues with a single experience or object is a fundamental process that improves object recognition and memory performance. However, neural mechanisms that bind sensory features during learning and augment memory…
Recent studies have consistently inferred high rates of adaptive molecular evolution between Drosophila species. At the same time, the Drosophila genome evolves under different rates of recombination, which results in partial genetic…
We consider the effects of social learning on the individual learning and genetic evolution of a colony of artificial agents capable of genetic, individual and social modes of adaptation. We confirm that there is strong selection pressure…