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How cognitive and environmental constraints influence the reliability of simulated animats in groups.

ABSTRACT: Evolving in groups can either enhance or reduce an individual's task performance. Still, we know little about the factors underlying group performance, which may be reduced to three major dimensions: (a) the individual's ability to perform a task, (b) the dependency on environmental conditions, and (c) the perception of, and the reaction to, other group members. In our research, we investigated how these dimensions interrelate in simulated evolution experiments using adaptive agents equipped with Markov brains ("animats"). We evolved the animats to perform a spatial-navigation task under various evolutionary setups. The last generation of each evolution simulation was tested across modified conditions to evaluate and compare the animats' reliability when faced with change. Moreover, the complexity of the evolved Markov brains was assessed based on measures of information integration. We found that, under the right conditions, specialized animats could be as reliable as animats already evolved for the modified tasks, and that reliability across varying group sizes correlated with evolved fitness in most tested evolutionary setups. Our results moreover suggest that balancing the number of individuals in a group may lead to higher reliability but also lower individual performance. Besides, high brain complexity was associated with balanced group sizes and, thus, high reliability under limited sensory capacity. However, additional sensors allowed for even higher reliability across modified environments without a need for complex, integrated Markov brains. Despite complex dependencies between the individual, the group, and the environment, our computational approach provides a way to study reliability in group behavior under controlled conditions. In all, our study revealed that balancing the group size and individual cognitive abilities prevents over-specialization and can help to evolve better reliability under unknown environmental situations.

SUBMITTER: Fischer D

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7006938 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Environmental enrichment (EE) conditions have profound beneficial effects for reinstating cognitive ability in neuropathological disorders like Alzheimerâs disease (AD). While EE benefits involve epigenetic gene control mechanisms that comprise histone acetylation, the histone acetyltransferases (HATs) involved remain largely unknown. Here, we examine a role for Tip60 HAT action in mediating activity- dependent beneficial neuroadaptations to EE using the Drosophila CNS mushroom body (MB) as a well-characterized cognition model. We show that flies raised under EE conditions display enhanced MB axonal outgrowth, synapse protein production, histone acetylation induction and transcriptional activation of cognition linked genes when compared to their genotypically identical siblings raised under isolated conditions. Further, these beneficial changes are impaired in both Tip60 HAT mutant flies and APP neurodegenerative flies. While EE conditions provide only slight beneficial neuroadaptive changes in the APP neurodegenerative fly MB, such positive changes are significantly enhanced by increasing MB Tip60 HAT levels. Our results implicate Tip60 as a critical mediator of EE-induced benefits, and provide insight into synergistic behavioral and epigenetic based approaches for treatment of cognitive disorders. EE has been shown to positively impact gene expression profiles in the mouse brain that are enriched in functions such as neuronal structure, synaptic plasticity and neurotransmission. Thus, we asked whether the EE induced beneficial MB structural and synaptic changes we observe are accompanied by neuroadaptive transcriptional benefits in the Drosophila MB, and if so, is Tip60 HAT action required for this process. To address this question, we accessed EE induced beneficial transcriptional changes using microarray. We crossed our UAS-mCD8-GFP;Tip60E431Q flies or control UAS-mCD8-GFP flies to MB GAL4 OK-107 to simultaneously induce Tip60 HAT loss in the MB while tagging MB cells with GFP. Adult progeny were exposed to EE or ISO conditions. After conditioning, the GFP tagged MB Kenyon neurons were FACs purified from conditioned fly brains from each genotype to enrich for detection of an EE induced MB transcriptional response. RNA was isolated from the purified Kenyon MB neurons and transcriptional changes for each genotype were assessed using microarray analysis

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How cognitive and environmental constraints influence the reliability of simulated animats in groups.

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