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What is behavior? Spontaneous behavior have been primarily the focus of ethology that aimed to characterize animal behavior. Recently that have been an increasing interest in dissecting the different components of animals’ spontaneous behavior. Less efforts have been targeted at formally defining what a behavior is. Animal behavior is studied within ecology and within neuroscience . Both fields have divergent approaches the former one focus on natural behavior and observation and the latter has brain centric view in which the brain is regarded as the sole generator of behavior ignoring the fact that the animals is embedded in an environment that shapes its behavior. Our approach aims to provide a general framework of behavior . This framework can also be used to describe global brain activity in relation to behavior and the environment in which the animal is embedded. The challenge of finding basic principles can be guided by theoretical framework like the one we are proposing. The principles usually derived are independent from the environment or define a set of static or defined changes to the behavior in response to the change of the environment. It is more natural to regard the behavior as in a constant feedback loop with a changing environment that in order to properly studied, one should not study them separately. The concept of affordance is able to capture this dynamical interdependent relationship between the animal and its environment.
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Elements of the theory = constraint, dynamics, memory, behavior, parameters that control the interaction of all the aforementioned ( (we should have a figure with a conceptual cartoon explaining the basic building blocks of our framework : C,D, M, B)
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Is closed loop necessary for behavior? behavior cannot be defined appropriately without reference to the environment in which the animal is embedded. This environment is in a closed loop interaction with the animal giving rise to ”behavior”. (I think it should be removed as a highlight from this article and save it to our other ideas concerning feedback).
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Affordance-diffusion model (different hidden Markov model)
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Map to thermodynamics quantities (which quantities should we calculate: work, entropy, causal entropy, etc..)
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Principles - minimax principle (game theory, Nash equilibrium), min of total variation distance. If the minmax principle maps onto game theoretic concepts then in this case, our affordance - diffusion model can provide a framework for many social cooperation behaviors ?! and economical decision making in constrained environments ( relationship to bounded rationality).
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Application of theory - Shaevitz, Gordon (main concepts from their papers are: studying of stereotype along with delineating it from non-stereotypical behavior, there is no mention of the environment but they talk about biomechanical limits, describing the behavioural states as periodic orbits, the aim of the unsupervised method that they developed is to uncover an underlying behavioral program, in fruit flies they found that there is a hierarchy of behaviors, multiple timescales, non-markovian dynamics )
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Examples