Abstract
Organisms must cope with different risk/reward landscapes in their ecological niche. Hence, species have evolved behavior and cognitive processes to optimally balance approach and avoidance. Navigation through space, including taking detours, appears also to be an essential element of consciousness. Such processes allow organisms to negotiate predation risk and natural geometry that obstruct foraging. One aspect of this is the ability to inhibit a direct approach toward a reward. Using an adaptation of the well-known detour paradigm in comparative psychology, but in a virtual world, we simulate how different neural configurations of inhibitive processes can yield behavior that approximates characteristics of different species. Results from simulations may help elucidate how evolutionary adaptation can shape inhibitive processing in particular and behavioral selection in general. More specifically, results indicate that both the level of inhibition that an organism can exert and the size of neural populations dedicated to inhibition contribute to successful detour navigation. According to our results, both factors help to facilitate detour behavior, but the latter (i.e., larger neural populations) appears to specifically reduce behavioral variation.
Highlights
Navigation through space, including taking detours, is an essential element of consciousness (Klein and Barron, 2016; Mallatt et al, 2021)
We show results suggesting that increasing the population size of spiking neurons in the neural network generally reduces behavioral variability of the agent, while increasing the weight of inhibition tends to reduce waiting time in the barrier zone
Within a group of the same population sizes, there is an analogous trend of barrier time reduction as inhibition level increases, going from a median of 12.4 at zero inhibition and a single neuron per population, to a median of 4.5 at inhibition level of one
Summary
Navigation through space, including taking detours, is an essential element of consciousness (Klein and Barron, 2016; Mallatt et al, 2021). It supports allocentric representations in addition to self-centered, or egocentric representations. The former affords to see the self in relation to the environment, like being behind a tree or to the east of a river. The latter affords direct movement like going forward or turning to the right
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