Related papers: Minimal motifs for habituating systems
Learning based on networks of real neurons, and by extension biologically inspired models of neural networks, has yet to find general learning rules leading to widespread applications. In this paper, we argue for the existence of a…
Random boolean networks are a model of genetic regulatory networks that has proven able to describe experimental data in biology. They not only reproduce important phenomena in cell dynamics, but they are also extremely interesting from a…
A biological circuit is a neural or biochemical cascade, taking inputs and producing outputs. How have biological circuits learned to solve environmental challenges over the history of life? The answer certainly follows Dobzhansky's famous…
Animals can learn efficiently from a single experience and change their future behavior in response. However, in other instances, animals learn very slowly, requiring thousands of experiences. Here I survey tasks involving fast and slow…
A ubiquitous phenomenon observed throughout the primate hierarchical visual system is the sparsification of the neural representation of visual stimuli as a result of familiarization by repeated exposure, manifested as the sharpening of the…
Living systems adapt to various environmental conditions by changing their internal states. Inspired by gene expression and epigenetic modification dynamics, we herein propose a generic mechanism for adaptation by combining fast oscillatory…
Cellular behavior is governed by gene regulatory processes that are intrinsically dynamic and nonlinear, and are subject to non-negligible amounts of random fluctuations. Such conditions are ubiquitous in physical systems, where they have…
Lifelong learning occurs on timescales ranging from minutes to decades. People can lose themselves in a new skill, practicing for hours until exhausted. And they can pursue mastery over days or decades, perhaps abandoning old skills…
Individual neurons often produce highly variable responses over nominally identical trials, reflecting a mixture of intrinsic "noise" and systematic changes in the animal's cognitive and behavioral state. Disentangling these sources of…
Many patterning events in multi-cellular organisms rely on cell-to-cell contact signaling, such as the Notch pathway in metazoans. A particularly interesting phenomenon in this form of communication is lateral inhibition where a cell that…
Trained human pilots or operators still stand out through their efficient, robust, and versatile skills in guidance tasks such as driving agile vehicles in spatial environments or performing complex surgeries. This research studies how…
To make informed decisions in natural environments that change over time, humans must update their beliefs as new observations are gathered. Studies exploring human inference as a dynamical process that unfolds in time have focused on…
Biological systems encode function not primarily in steady states, but in the structure of transient responses elicited by time-varying stimuli. Overshoots, biphasic dynamics, adaptation kinetics, fold-change detection, entrainment, and…
Bacteria live in environments that are continuously fluctuating and changing. Exploiting any predictability of such fluctuations can lead to an increased fitness. On longer timescales bacteria can "learn" the structure of these fluctuations…
Random walks represent an important tool for probing the structural and dynamical properties of networks and modeling transport and diffusion processes on networks. However, when individuals' movement becomes dictated by more complicated…
In complex systems, the interplay between nonlinear and stochastic dynamics, e.g., J. Monod's necessity and chance, gives rise to an evolutionary process in Darwinian sense, in terms of discrete jumps among attractors, with punctuated…
This thesis is about the study of complex systems through simple models. Our work evidences the relevance of this kind of modeling in science, which provides us with a better understanding of nature at minimum cost. The fundamentals tools…
Bacteria possess diverse mechanisms to regulate their motility in response to environmental and physiological signals, enabling them to navigate complex habitats and adapt their behavior. Among these mechanisms, interspecies recognition…
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.…
In both neuroscience and artificial intelligence, popular functional frameworks and neural network formulations operate by making use of extrinsic error measurements and global learning algorithms. Through a set of conjectures based on…