Related papers: Quantifying cellular autonomy in multi-cue environ…

How cells reliably infer information about their environment is a fundamentally important question. While sensing and signaling generally start with cell-surface receptors, the degree of accuracy with which a cell can measure external…

In this exploratory paper we introduce the problem of cognitive agents that learn how to modify their environment according to local sensing to reach a global goal. We concentrate on discrete dynamics (cellular automata) on a…

Cells continuously sense their surroundings to detect modifications and generate responses. Very often changes in extracellular concentrations initiate signaling cascades that eventually result in changes in gene expression. Increasing…

We revisit the role of instrumental value as a driver of adaptive behavior. In active inference, instrumental or extrinsic value is quantified by the information-theoretic surprisal of a set of observations measuring the extent to which…

In chemotaxis, cells are modulating their migration patterns in response to concentration gradients of a guiding substance. Immune cells are believed to use such chemotactic sensing for remotely detecting and homing in on pathogens.…

The sensitivity analysis of biological system models can significantly contribute to identifying and explaining influences of internal or external changes on model and its elements. We propose here a comprehensive framework to study…

When a cognitive system modifies its own functioning, what exactly does it modify: a low-level rule, a control rule, or the norm that evaluates its own revisions? Cognitive science describes executive control, metacognition, and…

Any organism is embedded in an environment that changes over time. The timescale for and statistics of environmental change, the precision with which the organism can detect its environment, and the costs and benefits of particular protein…

Behavior results from the integration of ongoing sensory signals and contextual information in various forms, such as past experience, expectations, current goals, etc. Thus, the response to a specific stimulus, say the ringing of a…

We define a cellular automaton where a resting cell excites if number of its excited neighbours belong to some specified interval and boundaries of the interval change depending on ratio of excited and refractory neighbours in the cell's…

A wide array of biological systems can navigate in shallow gradients of chemoattractant with remarkable precision. Whilst previous approaches model such systems using coarse-grained chemical density profiles, we construct a dynamical model…

A cell can be seen as an adaptive autonomous agent or as a society of adaptive autonomous agents, where each can exhibit a particular behaviour depending on its cognitive capabilities. We present an intracellular signalling model obtained…

Competitive interactions represent one of the driving forces behind evolution and natural selection in biological and sociological systems. For example, animals in an ecosystem may vie for food or mates; in a market economy, firms may…

Coordinated responses to environmental stimuli are critical for multicellular organisms. To overcome the obstacles of cell-to-cell heterogeneity and noisy signaling dynamics within individual cells, cells must effectively exchange…

In many biological networks the responses of individual elements are ambiguous. We consider a scenario in which many sensors respond to a shared signal, each with limited information capacity, and ask that the outputs together convey as…

As intelligent systems are developed across diverse substrates - from machine learning models and neuromorphic hardware to in vitro neural cultures - understanding what gives a system agency has become increasingly important. Existing…

Flexible cognition requires the ability to rapidly detect systematic functions of variables and guide future behavior based on predictions. The model described here proposes a potential framework for patterns of neural activity to detect…

Deciphering the control principles of metabolism and its interaction with other cellular functions is central to biomedicine and biotechnology. Yet, understanding the efficient control of metabolic fluxes remains elusive for large-scale…

Living systems, particularly multicellular systems, often seem hopelessly complex. But recent studies have suggested that beneath this complexity, there may be unifying quantitative principles that we are only now starting to unravel. All…

Information transmission in biological signaling circuits has often been described using the metaphor of a noise filter. Cellular systems need accurate, real-time data about their environmental conditions, but the biochemical reaction…