Related papers: Lamarckian inheritance following sensorimotor trai…
Associative learning allows animals to rapidly adapt to changes in the environment. Whether and what aspects of such acquired traits may be transmittable across generations remains unclear. Using prolonged olfactory training and subsequent…
Evolutionary robot systems offer two principal advantages: an advanced way of developing robots through evolutionary optimization and a special research platform to conduct what-if experiments regarding questions about evolution. Our study…
The insect olfactory system, which includes the antennal lobe (AL), mushroom body (MB), and ancillary structures, is a relatively simple neural system capable of learning. Its structural features, which are widespread in biological neural…
The co-optimization of a robot's body and brain presents a coupled challenge: the morphology constrains which control strategies are effective, while the control determines how well the morphology performs. To address this, we combine…
Lamarckian inheritance has been shown to be a powerful accelerator in systems where the joint evolution of robot morphologies and controllers is enhanced with individual learning. Its defining advantage lies in the offspring inheriting…
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…
The Drosophila mushroom body (MB) is known to be involved in olfactory learning and memory; the synaptic plasticity of the Kenyon cell (KC) to mushroom body output neuron (MBON) synapses plays a key role in the learning process. Previous…
Instructive influence of environment on heredity has been a debated topic for centuries. Darwin's identification of natural selection coupled to chance variation as the driving force for evolution, against a formal interpretation proposed…
Handedness in humans - better performance using either the left or right hand - is personally familiar, moderately heritable, and regulated by many genes, including those involved in general body symmetry. But behavioral handedness, i.e.…
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…
Current models of animal evolution focus on selection of individuals, ignoring the much faster selection of symbiotic bacteria. Here we take host-symbiont interactions into account by introducing a Population Genetics-like model of…
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…
Recordings from neurons in the insects' olfactory primary processing center, the antennal lobe (AL), reveal that the AL is able to process the input from chemical receptors into distinct neural activity patterns, called olfactory neural…
This study explores the integration of Lamarckian system into evolutionary robotics (ER), comparing it with the traditional Darwinian model across various environments. By adopting Lamarckian principles, where robots inherit learned traits,…
The reshaping and decorrelation of similar activity patterns by neuronal networks can enhance their discriminability, storage, and retrieval. How can such networks learn to decorrelate new complex patterns, as they arise in the olfactory…
In evolutionary robotics, robot morphologies are designed automatically using evolutionary algorithms. This creates a body-brain optimization problem, where both morphology and control must be optimized together. A common approach is to…
Our understanding of the neural basis of locomotor behavior can be informed by careful quantification of animal movement. Classical descriptions of legged locomotion have defined discrete locomotor gaits, characterized by distinct patterns…
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…
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…
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…