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Cognition is the process of knowing. As carried out by a dynamical system, it is the process by which the system absorbs information into its state. A complex network of agents cognizes knowledge about its environment, internal dynamics and…
Environmental fluctuations can shape replicator dynamics, with important consequences for both prebiotic and modern ecosystems. However, it remains unclear how simple replicators can acquire and use information about fluctuating…
Throughout the cognitive-science literature, there is widespread agreement that decision-making agents operating in the real world do so under limited information-processing capabilities and without access to unbounded cognitive or…
Robustness, the insensitivity of some of a biological system's functionalities to a set of distinct conditions, is intimately linked to fitness. Recent studies suggest that it may also play a vital role in enabling the evolution of species.…
Animal vision is thought to optimize various objectives from metabolic efficiency to discrimination performance, yet its ultimate objective is to facilitate the survival of the animal within its ecological niche. However, modeling animal…
Dynamics of a social population is analyzed taking into account some physical constraints on individual behavior and decision making abilities. The model, based on Evolutionary Game Theory, predicts that a population has to pass through a…
Despite deep-learning being state-of-the-art for data-driven model predictions, it has not yet found frequent application in ecology. Given the low sample size typical in many environmental research fields, the default choice for the…
Organisms adapt to volatile environments by integrating sensory information with internal memory, yet their information processing is constrained by resource limitations. Such limitations can fundamentally alter optimal estimation…
Redundancy is a fundamental characteristic of many biological processes such as those in the genetic, visual, muscular and nervous system; yet its function has not been fully understood. The conventional interpretation of redundancy is that…
Biologists and physicists have a rich tradition of modeling living systems with simple models composed of a few interacting components. Despite the remarkable success of this approach, it remains unclear how to use such finely tuned models…
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become central to post-training reasoning models, yet a key limitation of existing studies is their narrow view of the reasoning space: difficulty is treated as reasoning depth…
In evolution theory the concept of a fitness landscape has played an important role, evolution itself being portrayed as a hill-climbing process on a rugged landscape. In this article it is shown that in general, in the presence of other…
The motility skills of phytoplankton have evolved and persisted over millions of years, primarily in response to factors such as nutrient and light availability, temperature and viscosity gradients, turbulence, and predation pressure.…
Biological systems are modular, and this modularity evolves over time and in different environments. A number of observations have been made of increased modularity in biological systems under increased environmental pressure. We here…
The theory of natural selection has two forms. Deductive theory describes how populations change over time. One starts with an initial population and some rules for change. From those assumptions, one calculates the future state of the…
Costly cooperation and costly signaling are both difficult to reconcile with simple fitness maximization, yet both are common in biological and social systems. We study a model in which agents emit costly signals and condition their actions…
Many aspects of human learning have been proposed as a process of constructing mental programs: from acquiring symbolic number representations to intuitive theories about the world. In parallel, there is a long-tradition of using…
Fitness consequence of dispersal depends on property of the entire landscape, which patches are available and what are the cost of moving. These are information that are not available locally when an organism make the decision to disperse.…
We consider adaptive decision-making problems where an agent optimizes a cumulative performance objective by repeatedly choosing among a finite set of options. Compared to the classical prediction-with-expert-advice set-up, we consider…
There is a consensus that human and non-human subjects experience temporal distortions in many stages of their perceptual and decision-making systems. Similarly, intertemporal choice research has shown that decision-makers undervalue future…