Columbia University in the City of New York

Sep 29, 20201:00 pm
Seminar

Tuning movement to optimize information harvesting and the transition to planning

Featuring Malcolm MacIver, PhD, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

September 29th, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

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This seminar will be held online. Register here

Information about potential fitness enhancers is dispersed in space, which provides a logic to the heterotroph strategy of moving to acquire resources. But how ought animals move to optimally acquire information? Current work on Lévy-flight like trajectories may apply to the context of acquiring resources that are far outside the range of sensory systems, but are not predictive when resources are in range. Entropy minimization approaches like infotaxis provide predictions for how animals ought to move when targets are in sensory range, but these do not agree well with measured trajectories. We present a new approach, energy-constrained proportional betting, and show that it generates trajectories that agree well with measured trajectories of animals localizing targets across four species spanning insects, fish, and mammals. When animals can see distant and volatile information sources that are themselves also capable of complex behavior, there may be a selective benefit to planning. We show simulation results that provide evidence that the benefit of planning is contingent on the topology of habitats. Those habitats with the right combination of range and topology to favor the evolution of planning appear to be restricted to a subset of those on land, and are not present in the aquatic domain.

Those who wish to meet the speaker during their visit should contact Nick Singletary, Gottlieb Lab.

The Columbia Neuroscience Seminar series is a collaborative effort of Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, the Department of Neuroscience, the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior and the Columbia Translational Neuroscience Initiative, and with support from the Kavli Institute for Brain Science.

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