Related papers: Errors drive the evolution of biological signallin…
Biological synaptic transmission is unreliable, and this unreliability likely degrades neural circuit performance. While there are biophysical mechanisms that can increase reliability, for instance by increasing vesicle release probability,…
Costly cooperation and costly signaling are both difficult to reconcile with simple fitness maximization, yet both are common in biological and social systems. We study a model in which agents emit costly signals and condition their actions…
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…
Energy efficient information transmission may be relevant to biological sensory signal processing as well as to low power electronic devices. We explore its consequences in two different regimes. In an ``immediate'' regime, we argue that…
In complex environments, there are costs to both ignorance and perception. An organism needs to track fitness-relevant information about its world, but the more information it tracks, the more resources it must devote to memory and…
This paper examines signalling when the sender exerts effort and receives benefits over time. Receivers only observe a noisy public signal about the effort, which has no intrinsic value. The modelling of signalling in a dynamic context…
Signal transduction, or signal-processing capability, is a fundamental property of nature that manifests universally across systems of different scales -- from quantum behaviour to the biological. This includes the detection of…
The function of the organism hinges on the performance of its information-processing networks, which convey information via molecular recognition. Many paths within these networks utilize molecular codebooks, such as the genetic code, to…
We describe systems using Kauffman and similar networks. They are directed funct ioning networks consisting of finite number of nodes with finite number of discr ete states evaluated in synchronous mode of discrete time. In this paper we…
Studies of human decision-making demonstrate that environmental regularities, such as natural image statistics or intentionally nonuniform stimulus probabilities, can be exploited to improve efficiency (termed `efficient-coding').…
Living cells can leverage correlations in environmental fluctuations to predict the future environment and mount a response ahead of time. To this end, cells need to encode the past signal into the output of the intracellular network from…
In this work we explore encoding strategies learned by statistical models of sensory coding in noisy spiking networks. Early stages of sensory communication in neural systems can be viewed as encoding channels in the information-theoretic…
Neural codes appear efficient. Naturally, neuroscientists contend that an efficient process is responsible for generating efficient codes. They argue that natural selection is the efficient process that generates those codes. Although…
Signaling is wasteful. But how wasteful? We study the fraction of surplus dissipated in a separating equilibrium. For isoelastic environments, this waste ratio has a simple formula: $\beta/(\beta+\sigma)$, where $\beta$ is the benefit…
The use of non-orthogonal signals has several benefits over orthogonal signals in multi-coded communications. We provide a novel, theoretical study of non-orthogonal signaling to expand the applicability of these schemes. Motivated by a…
Noise is a ubiquitous feature of the physical world. As a result, the first prerequisite of life is fault tolerance: maintaining integrity of state despite external bombardment. Recent experimental advances have revealed that biological…
Quantitative research relies heavily on coding, and coding errors are relatively common even in published research. In this paper, we examine whether individuals are more or less likely to check their code depending on the results they…
One of the major problems in modeling natural signals is that signals with very similar structure may locally have completely different measurements, e.g., images taken under different illumination conditions, or the speech signal captured…
Lateralization is ubiquitous in vertebrate brains which, as well as its role in locomotion, is considered an important factor in biological intelligence. Lateralization has been associated with both poor and good performance. It has been…
In many situations, the gene expression signature is a unique marker of the biological state. We study the modification of the gene expression distribution function when the biological state of a system experiences a change. This change may…