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Displaying entries 31 through 45 of 47 found.

Life's Corporeal Evolution Develops, Encodes and Organizes Itself: An EarthWinian Genesis Synthesis

Gorbonos, Dan, et al. Geometrical Structure of Bifurcations during Spatial Decision-Making. PRX Life. 2/1, 2024. In this new Physical Review journal, DG and Iain Cousin, MPI Animal Behavior, and Nir Gur, Weizmann Institute of Science add a further technical finesse about how creaturely movements keep their assemblage and perform so well. Rapid internal responses are seen to imply a statistical physics spin model along with an active particle coherence.

Animals must constantly make decisions on the move among multiple options. Here we model this process to explore how its dynamics accounts for branching trajectories exhibited by animals during spatial decision-making, and to provide new insights into spatiotemporal computation. Our analysis reveals the nature of the spontaneous symmetry breaking bifurcations in trajectory space and new geometric principles for spatiotemporal decision-making. This suggests that a non-Euclidean neural representation of space may be expected to have evolved across species in order to facilitate spatial decision-making. (Excerpt)

These results highlight the richness of this spin model, where movement through space is determined by spin-spin interactions, which are in turn dependent on the position of the animal or group with respect to the targets. The model has a broader theoretical physics perspective due to its coupling of equilibrium spin dynamics and propulsion of active-matter particles, as well as its connection to general research on decision-making in moving agents. (10)

Herbrich, Maxime, et al. Network nestedness in primates: a structural constraint or a biological advantage of social complexity?. arXiv:2402.13658. Université de Strasbourg, Utrecht University, University of Agder, Norway, University of Greenwich, UK, Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, Göttingen, University of Konstanz, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Kyoto University, University of Lausanne, and Inkawu Vervet Project, South Africa animal behaviorists join field work with theoretic studies to conclude that external environs have a larger role than somatic or neural aspects.

This study investigates the prevalence of nestedness within primate social networks by its relationship with cognitive and structural factors. We studied 51 primate groups across 21 species to evaluate nestedness, modularity, neocortex ratio, and group size. We found a significant occurrence of this multiplex feature exceeding chance expectations. Our analysis showed little correlation with neocortex ratio or group size, which suggests a greater role for ecological factors in cognitive evolution. Overall, our research provides new insights into primate social network structures by way of complex interplays between network geometries. (Excerpt)

Life’s Cerebral Cognizance Becomes More Complex, Smarter, Informed, Proactive, Self-Aware

Quin-Conroy, Josephine, et al.. Patterns of language and visuospatial functional lateralization and cognitive ability. Laterality. September, 2023. University of Western Australia linguists contribute a latest quantified affirmation of nature’s archetypal hemispheric preferences. Once again we wonder however these verse and vision complements could be known well enough such that they might apply to political parties.

For most individuals, language is predominately localized to the left hemisphere of the brain and visuospatial processing to the right. Evolutionary theories of lateralization suggest that this typical pattern is most common as it delivers a cognitive advantage. In contrast, deviations from the typical pattern may lead to poorer cognitive abilities. The aim of this systematic review was to assess the evidence for an association between patterns of language and visuospatial lateralization and measures of cognitive ability. (Excerpt).

University of Western Australia Just 10 minutes from Perth city, UWA is located on the banks of the Swan River on the land of the Whadjuk Nation. We have the privilege of being on sacred soil where Western Australian kaartdijin, or knowledge, began. It has been a place to gather and learn for tens of thousands of years by the world’s oldest continuous culture.

Mitchell, Kevin. Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023. The author, a neuro-geneticist at Trinity College Dublin, studies the many relationships between genes, brains, and minds on both individual and evolutionary levels. Into these 2020s he has prepared the first whole book length treatment for the leading edge content of this Life’s Cerebral Cognizance Becomes More Complex, Smarter, Informed, Proactive, Self-Aware chapter. In so doing, the work describes an oriented encephalization from sensory stirrings to scales of ramified neural complexities all the way to our mosaic neocortex. A central track becomes evident as an increasing adaptive behavior with regard to one’s own life, group and environs. In retrospect, life’s cerebral/cognitive evolutionary course can then be seen to assert a liberated agency of personal choice. The vital message (my take) from brains instead of bones could be that we peoples can rise from sinners to winners, avoid nuclear war, and proceed to select ourselves as a unified Earthropocene success.

Scientists are finding how brain activity controls behavior and neural circuits effect actions. But many still conclude that agency—or free will—is an illusion. Free Agents presents a wealth of evidence to the contrary, arguing that we are not mere machines but distinct selves empowered with purpose. Across Earth’s long evolution, Mitchell describes how living beings capable of choice arose from physical origins. As nervous systems came to be, they gave sentient animals the capacity to model, predict, and simulate. These faculties have reached their peak with our human abilities to imagine, introspect, reason and view possible futures. {Publisher)

A purely reductionist, mechanistic approach to life misses the point. On the contrary, basic laws of physics that deal only with energy and matter and forces cannot explain what life is or its defining property – living organisms do things for reasons, as causal agents, in their own right. They are driven by information whose meaning is embedded in the structure of the system itself, based on its history. In short, there are distinct types of causation at play in living organisms by virtue of their organization. (x-xi)

As we will see in later chapters, meaning and value are the internal currency and action selection that emerged as life continued to evolve. From the rocks and sea of our early world, life arose as organisms that maintained theor internal states and sustain a degree of causal autonomy from the world around them. The next step in the evolution of agency is the ability of these autonomous organisms to back upon the world, to become causes in their own right. (43)

In humans, the expansion of our neural resources and recursive architecture of our cognitive systems gave us the ability to think about thoughts. Our minds were set free. We are capable of open-ended truly creative imaginations and hypothetical futures, of creating art, music, science, abstract reasoning that has revealed the deepest laws and principles of the universe. (294)

And we do not do this alone: the true power of human thought comes through collective interactions and cumulative culture. We have as individuals and as a species the power to transcend the immediacies of our own biology. And, though the prospects seem gloomy, we have within our reach the possibility of wisdom, of making optimal decisions for the long-term survival of our planet if we choose to exercise it. (294)

Youngblood, Mason. Language-like efficiency and structure in house finch song. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. April, 2024. As his bio below says, by way of the latest computational abilities, it is now possible to find generic similarities between avian twittering and the social network Twitter. The same mathematical formats thus seem to repeat themselves in kind across each and every conversational mode.

Communication needs to be complex enough to be functional while minimizing learning and production costs. Recent work suggests that the vocalizations and gestures of some songbirds, cetaceans and great apes may conform to linguistic laws that reflect this trade-off between efficiency and complexity. In these studies, clustering signals into types cannot be done a priori, and an analysis may affect statistical signals in the data. Here we assess the language-like efficiency and structure in house finch song across three levels of granularity in syllable clustering. The results show strong evidence for Zipf's rank–frequency law, Zipf's law of abbreviation and Menzerath's law. These statistical patterns are robust and exhibit a degree of scale invariance. (Excerpt)

My name is Mason Youngblood, and I am a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University. In my research, I apply methods from cognitive science, computational social science, and cultural evolution to questions about human and non-human animal behavior. Specifically, I’m interested in understanding how cognitive biases and population structure shape the cultural evolution of behaviors and beliefs (e.g. music, extremist ideology, birdsong, conspiracy theories).

Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Individuality

Pierre-Yves Oudeyer. www.pyoudeyer.com.. . The French computational psychologist (search) is the director of the Flowers project-team at the Inria Center of University of Bordeaux. Current (March 2024) projects are now much involved with chatty AI features guided by insights gained from studies with children. A recent talk is Developmental AI: machines that learn like children and help children learn better. As the quotes say, another senior scholar finds evidence that both youngsters and large language modes use trail/error iterate methods in similar ways. See also Open-ended learning and development in machines and humans on the flowers.inria.fr. site.

Together with a great team, I study lifelong autonomous learning, and the self-organization of behavioural, cognitive and language structures at the frontiers of artificial intelligence and cognitive sciences. I use machines as tools to understand better how children learn and develop, and I study how one can build machines that learn autonomously like children, as well as integrate within human cultures, within the new field of developmental artificial intelligence. (P-Y O)

The Flowers project-team, at the University of Bordeaux and at Ensta ParisTech, studies versions of hoistic individual development. These models can help us better understand how children learn, as well as to build machines that gain knowledge as children do, aka developmental artificial intelligence, with applications in educational technologies, automated discovery, robotics and human-computer interaction.

Lindsay, Grace. Models of the Mind: How Physics, Engineering and Mathematics Have Shaped Our Understanding of the Brain.. London: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2021. An Assistant Professor of Psychology and Data Science at New York University begins her book with a review of mathematic and physical principles so they can be applied to cognitive functions such as memories, vision, decision making, excitation/inhibition. With this currency in place, some Grand Unified Theories are surveyed such as Karl Friston’s free energy, Jeff Hawkins’ Thousand Brains project, and Giulio Tononi’s integrated information model. And one wonders whomever is this late planetary faculty as it proceeds to learns on its own. What manner of multiuniverse needs to form a midway self-representation, realization and participatory affirmation?

In Models of the Mind, computational neuroscientist Grace Lindsay explains how mathematical models have allowed researchers to understand and describe many of the brain's processes such as decision-making, sensory processing, stored memory, and more. Each chapter focuses on mathematical tools that have been applied from the individual neuron to their many interactions, whole brain areas and the consequent behaviours. In addition, Grace examines the history of the field from the eighteenth century and to the large models of neural networks that form the basis of modern artificial intelligence.

Ryali, Srikanth, et al. Deep learning models reveal replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human functional brain organization. PNAS. 121, 2024. Into this year, Stanford University psychologists including Vinod Menon make a strong empirical case that there are significant distinctions between the bilateral brains and consequent behaviors of women and men. Using the latest explainable neural net methods (XAI), the team were consistently able to quantify an array of typical masculine and feminine characteristics. Google the title for many reviews of this major work (which of course we knew all along).

Sex is an important biological factor that influences human behavior, impacting cognitive capacity and the manifestation of psychiatric and neurological disorders. However, previous research on how brain organization differs between males and females remain mostly inconclusive. Leveraging recent advances in artificial intelligence and large multicohort functional MRI datasets, we identify replicable, generalizable, and behaviorally relevant sex differences in human neural architecture localized to the default mode network, striatum, and limbic network. (Excerpt)

Nichols, Ryan. Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges. Evolutionary Human Sciences. Volume 6, February, 2024. In this Cambridge Press journal edited by Oxford anthropologist Ruth Mace, eleven sociality scientists with postings in the USA, Morocco, Denmark, Germany, France and Spain including Mathieu Charbonneau, Miriam Haidle and Jose Segovia-Martin address a real concern that this academic field which should follow from biological sources remains ill defined, parcellated, debated to an extent that inhibits clarity and integrity. After a broad review of these issues, several pathways toward consiience are laid out.

Perez, Jermey, et al. Perez, Jeremy, et al. Cultural evolution in populations of Large Language Models. arXiv:2403.08882. Flowers Team, INRIA, Bordeaux, France scholars including Pierre-Yves Oudeyer (search) advance insightful approaches to provide better, more humane, realistic editorial guidance for these vicarious textual corpora. By March 2024, as the Earthificial section above reports, it has been noticed that these spontaneous cognitive venues actually seem to train themselves akin to how children persistently learn to speak and discover.