One Algorithm to Rule Decision-Making
upstart writes:
One algorithm to rule decision-making:
For most animals, life is about deciding where to go. Running, swimming, or flying through the world, animals are constantly making decisions while on the move-decisions that allow them to choose where to eat, where to hide, and with whom to associate. Breakthroughs in neurobiology over the past decades, including those awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Medicine, have pieced together a picture of how animals represent spatially-distributed options. Now, an international team of researchers have applied this neurobiological knowledge to understand how animals choose among options scattered in space.
[...] Drawing inspiration from neurobiology, physics and animal behavior, the interdisciplinary team constructed a computational model of decision-making in the brain. The model took features of how the brain represents options in "space" -- in this case direction to potential destinations -- in order to understand how decisions are made on the move.
[...] The resulting model predicted that the brain spontaneously breaks down decisions among multiple options to a series of two-choice decisions until only one option -- the one ultimately selected -remains. This was found to result in animals exhibiting a series of abrupt changes in direction, each associated with the exclusion of one of the remaining options. Each change of direction was a result of sudden changes in neural dynamics -- a property scientists call a "bifurcation" -- at very specific geometrical relationships between the animal and the remaining options.
The algorithm was found to be so robust that the researchers predicted, not only would this "bifurcation" process result in highly accurate decisions, but also that it could be 'universal'. By overlaying many trajectories of their simulated animals, they found a branching structure that should, they expected, also be apparent if they overlaid many trajectories taken by real animals making spatial decisions.
Journal Reference:
Vivek H. Sridhar, Liang Li, Dan Gorbonos, et al. The geometry of decision-making in individuals and collectives [open], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2102157118)
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