preprint,amsmath,amssymb,aps,]revtex4-1 What is a behavior? Defining and understanding animal behavior is a key problem in biology generally. We don’t have a good general formal theory of behavior. There have been a tremendous development in methods to analyze and cluster behavior, into its components, without formulating the mechanism by which behavior emerges from the interaction of these different elements (clusters or sub-clusters). The few available attempts consider very specific examples without formulating a general theory, or when there is a general theory, it is not formalized enough to allow quantitative predictions.

In this work, our aim is to introduce a theory that is general enough to explain basic characteristics of animal behaviors, but precise enough to allow quantitative predictions about animal behaviors.

First, we will consider a very simple model of a dynamical process on phase space to derive some basic principles. We call this simple model ”Affordance - Diffusion model” in which behavior is abstracted as a particle diffusing over an affordance landscape, which is an energy landscape dynamically changing in time. Second, we compute the potential in the case of the particle, in the affordance - diffusion model, is interacting with some given constraints. Third, we derive two main general principles of ”behavior” within the framework of the affordance - diffusion model: ”minimax principle of affordance” and ”the variational principle of affordance” (blurb about the principles ?!). Our study lay the foundation for a thermodynamical theory of behavior.

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