Related papers: Subcritical escape waves in schooling fish

Collective motion is commonly modeled with simple interaction rules between agents. Yet in nature, numerous observables vary within and between individuals and it remains largely unknown how animals respond to this variability, and how much…

Theoretical ecology has traditionally equated persistence with the stability of a fixed equilibrium point. Here we argue that the primary threat to ecosystem persistence need not be the loss of stability, but instead the escape of the…

Living organisms process information to interact and adapt to their changing environment with the goal of finding food, mates or averting hazards. The structure of their niche has profound repercussions by both selecting their internal…

Biological organisms are adaptive, able to function in unpredictably changing environments. Drawing on recent nonequilibrium physics, we show that in adaptation, fitness has two components parameterized by observable coordinates: a static…

Animals chain movements into long-lived motor strategies, exhibiting variability across scales that reflects the interplay between internal states and environmental cues. To reveal structure in such variability, we build Markov models of…

Random Threshold Networks (RTNs) are an idealized model of diluted, non symmetric spin glasses, neural networks or gene regulatory networks. RTNs also serve as an interesting general example of any coordinated causal system. Here we study…

Previous human foraging experiments have shown that human groups routinely undermatch environmental resources much like other animal species. In this experiment, we test whether humans also selectively rely on others as information sources…

There is mounting empirical evidence that many communities of living organisms display key features which closely resemble those of physical systems at criticality. We here introduce a minimal model framework for the dynamics of a community…

It is a widely accepted fact that the computational capability of recurrent neural networks is maximized on the so-called "edge of criticality". Once the network operates in this configuration, it performs efficiently on a specific…

Normal anxiety is considered an adaptive response to the possible presence of danger, but is susceptible to dysregulation. Anxiety disorders are prevalent at high frequency in contemporary human societies, yet impose substantial disability…

Flocks of birds exhibit a remarkable degree of coordination and collective response. It is not just that thousands of individuals fly, on average, in the same direction and at the same speed, but that even the fluctuations around the mean…

The critical brain hypothesis posits that neural systems operate near a phase transition, optimizing the processing of information. While scale invariance and non-Gaussian dynamics--hallmarks of criticality--have been observed in brain…

The complex formations exhibited by schooling fish have long been the object of fascination for biologists and physicists. However, the physical and sensory mechanisms leading to organized collective behavior remain elusive. On the physical…

Bird migration is an adaptive behavior ultimately aiming at optimizing survival and reproductive success. We propose an optimal switching model to study bird migration, where birds' migration behaviors can be efficiently modeled as…

Biological organisms are open, adaptve systems that can respond to changes in environment in specific ways. Adaptation and response can be posed as an optimization problem, with a tradeoff between the benefit obtained from a response and…

A recurrent idea in the study of complex systems is that optimal information processing is to be found near bifurcation points or phase transitions. However, this heuristic hypothesis has few (if any) concrete realizations where a standard…

Dynamical criticality has been shown to enhance information processing in dynamical systems, and there is evidence for self-organized criticality in neural networks. A plausible mechanism for such self-organization is activity dependent…

Throughout the animal kingdom, animals frequently benefit from living in groups. Models of collective behaviour show that simple local interactions are sufficient to generate group morphologies found in nature (swarms, flocks and mills).…

Animal and robot social interactions are interesting both for ethological studies and robotics. On the one hand, the robots can be tools and models to analyse animal collective behaviours, on the other hand, the robots and their artificial…

Biological systems with many components often exhibit seemingly critical behaviors, characterized by atypically large correlated fluctuations. Yet the underlying causes remain unclear. Here we define and examine two types of criticality.…