Related papers: Weak universality in sensory tradeoffs
Exploring the climate impacts of various anthropogenic emissions scenarios is key to making informed decisions for climate change mitigation and adaptation. State-of-the-art Earth system models can provide detailed insight into these…
All biological and artificial agents must learn and make decisions given limits on their ability to process information. As such, a general theory of adaptive behavior should be able to account for the complex interactions between an…
Dynamic optimisation occurs in a variety of real-world problems. To tackle these problems, evolutionary algorithms have been extensively used due to their effectiveness and minimum design effort. However, for dynamic problems, extra…
Recent progress in diverse intelligence has shown simple learning capacities below the organism level - single cells and even molecular networks. However, there are still many knowledge gaps around learning capacity above the organism…
When mutation rates are low, natural selection remains effective, and increasing the mutation rate can give rise to an increase in adaptation rate. When mutation rates are high to begin with, however, increasing the mutation rate may have a…
Resource constraints can fundamentally change both learning and decision-making. We explore how memory constraints influence an agent's performance when navigating unknown environments using standard reinforcement learning algorithms.…
Neuronal responses are conspicuously variable. We focus on one particular aspect of that variability: the precision of action potential timing. We show that for common models of noisy spike generation, elementary considerations imply that…
Over repeat presentations of the same stimulus, sensory neurons show variable responses. This "noise" is typically correlated between pairs of cells, and a question with rich history in neuroscience is how these noise correlations impact…
The evolution of symbolic communication is a longstanding open research question in biology. While some theories suggest that it originated from sub-symbolic communication (i.e., iconic or indexical), little experimental evidence exists on…
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…
A fundamental aspect of behaviour is the ability to encode salient features of experience in memory and use these memories, in combination with current sensory information, to predict the best action for each situation such that long-term…
Environmental stochasticity is known to be a destabilizing factor, increasing abundance fluctuations and extinction rates of populations. However, the stability of a community may benefit from the differential response of species to…
It was observed before that due to convergence in the olfactory system a possible amplification can be as large as the degree of convergence. This is in the case when a single impulse from the converging inputs is enough to trigger the…
Using theory and experiments, this paper shows that the difficulty of making tradeoffs offers a parsimonious explanation for a wide range of behavioral phenomena. We develop a model of imprecise comparisons applicable to multiattribute,…
The evolution of dispersal rate is studied with a model of several local populations linked by dispersal. Three dispersal strategies are considered where all, half, or none of the offspring disperse. The spatial scale (number of patches)…
It is known that evolution strategies in continuous domains might not converge in the presence of noise. It is also known that, under mild assumptions, and using an increasing number of resamplings, one can mitigate the effect of additive…
All sequential decision-making agents explore so as to acquire knowledge about a particular target. It is often the responsibility of the agent designer to construct this target which, in rich and complex environments, constitutes a onerous…
Uncertainty, characterised by randomness and stochasticity, is ubiquitous in applications of evolutionary game theory across various fields, including biology, economics and social sciences. The uncertainty may arise from various sources…
In complex ecosystems such as microbial communities, there is constant ecological and evolutionary feedback between the residing species and the environment occurring on concurrent timescales. Species respond and adapt to their surroundings…
Brains adapt to the statistical structure of their input. In the visual system, local light intensities change rapidly, the variance of the intensity changes more slowly, and the dynamic range of contrast itself changes more slowly still.…