Abstract
While animals track or search for targets, sensory organs make small unexplained movements on top of the primary task-related motions. While multiple theories for these movements exist—in that they support infotaxis, gain adaptation, spectral whitening, and high-pass filtering—predicted trajectories show poor fit to measured trajectories. We propose a new theory for these movements called energy-constrained proportional betting, where the probability of moving to a location is proportional to an expectation of how informative it will be balanced against the movement’s predicted energetic cost. Trajectories generated in this way show good agreement with measured trajectories of fish tracking an object using electrosense, a mammal and an insect localizing an odor source, and a moth tracking a flower using vision. Our theory unifies the metabolic cost of motion with information theory. It predicts sense organ movements in animals and can prescribe sensor motion for robots to enhance performance.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | e52371 |
Pages (from-to) | 1-39 |
Number of pages | 39 |
Journal | eLife |
Volume | 9 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Sep 2020 |
Funding
We thank Mark Willis, Simon Sponberg, and Ken Catania for providing the original behavioral tracking data used for the studies we have cited. We thank the anonymous reviewers for many improve-ments as well as a suggestion on biological implementation. We thank Madhav Mani and Brennan Sprinkle for helpful discussions and feedback on an earlier draft. Funded by National Science Foundation IIS-1427419, EECCS-1835389, and ECCS-1837515. National Science Foundation IIS-1427419 Malcolm A MacIver National Science Foundation ECCS-1835389 Malcolm A MacIver National Science Foundation ECCS-1837515 Todd D Murphey. We thank Mark Willis, Simon Sponberg, and Ken Catania for providing the original behavioral tracking data used for the studies we have cited. We thank the anonymous reviewers for many improvements as well as a suggestion on biological implementation. We thank Madhav Mani and Brennan Sprinkle for helpful discussions and feedback on an earlier draft. Funded by National Science Foundation IIS-1427419, EECCS-1835389, and ECCS-1837515.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Neuroscience
- General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
- General Immunology and Microbiology