Related papers: Normative theory of patch foraging decisions
Foraging is a crucial activity, yet the extent to which humans employ flexible versus rigid strategies remains unclear. This study investigates how individuals adapt their foraging strategies in response to resource distribution and…
Organisms and ecological groups accumulate evidence to make decisions. Classic experiments and theoretical studies have explored this process when the correct choice is fixed during each trial. However, we live in a constantly changing…
We study a simple model of a forager as a walk that modifies a relaxing substrate. Within it simplicity, this provides an insight on a number of relevant and non-intuitive facts. Even without memory of the good places to feed and no…
The ability to flexibly compose previously acquired skills to execute intelligent behaviors is a hallmark of natural intelligence. Such compositional flexibility is often attributed to context-dependent gating mechanisms that determine how…
We introduce the \emph{frugal foraging} model in which a forager performs a discrete-time random walk on a lattice, where each site initially contains $\mathcal{S}$ food units. The forager metabolizes one unit of food at each step and…
Naturalistic animal behavior exhibits a strikingly complex organization in the temporal domain, whose variability stems from at least three sources: hierarchical, contextual, and stochastic. What are the neural mechanisms and computational…
Every interaction of a living organism with its environment involves the placement of a bet. Armed with partial knowledge about a stochastic world, the organism must decide its next step or near-term strategy, an act that implicitly or…
Creative exploration is central to science, art and cognitive development. However, research on creative exploration is limited by a lack of high-resolution automated paradigms. To address this, we present such an automated paradigm, the…
Localizing behaviors of neural networks to a subset of the network's components or a subset of interactions between components is a natural first step towards analyzing network mechanisms and possible failure modes. Existing work is often…
In biology phenotypic switching is a common bet-hedging strategy in the face of uncertain environmental conditions. Existing mathematical models often focus on periodically changing environments to determine the optimal phenotypic response.…
Living in groups brings benefits to many animals, such as a protection against predators and an improved capacity for sensing and making decisions while searching for resources in uncertain environments. A body of studies has shown how…
Almost all neural computations involve making predictions. Whether an organism is trying to catch prey, avoid predators, or simply move through a complex environment, the data it collects through its senses can guide its actions only to the…
I describe a framework for adaptive scientific exploration based on iterating an Observation--Inference--Design cycle that allows adjustment of hypotheses and observing protocols in response to the results of observation on-the-fly, as data…
Complex behavioral contagion in collective evasion of mobile animal groups can be predicted by reconstructing quantitative interaction networks. Based on the assumption of time-scale separation between a fast contagion process and a slower…
Animals form groups for many reasons but there are costs and benefit associated with group formation. One of the benefits is collective memory. In groups on the move, social interactions play a crucial role in the cohesion and the ability…
Dropout has recently emerged as a powerful and simple method for training neural networks preventing co-adaptation by stochastically omitting neurons. Dropout is currently not grounded in explicit modelling assumptions which so far has…
A diversity of decision-making systems has been observed in animal collectives. In some species, choices depend on the differences of the numbers of animals that have chosen each of the available options, while in other species on the…
We introduce a model of traveling agents ({\it e.g.} frugivorous animals) who feed on randomly located vegetation patches and disperse their seeds, thus modifying the spatial distribution of resources in the long term. It is assumed that…
For group-living animals, reaching consensus to stay cohesive is crucial for their fitness, particularly when collective motion starts and stops. Understanding the decision-making at individual and collective levels upon sudden disturbances…
We analyze the properties of model food webs and of fifteen community food webs from a variety of environments. We first perform a theoretical analysis of the niche model of Williams and Martinez. We derive analytical expressions for the…