Universität zu Köln

Meyer, Bernd, Ansorge, Cedrick ORCID: 0000-0001-9913-3759 and Nakagaki, Toshiyuki ORCID: 0000-0002-3446-4888 (2017). The role of noise in self-organized decision making by the true slime mold Physarum polycephalum. PLoS One, 12 (3). SAN FRANCISCO: PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE. ISSN 1932-6203

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Abstract

Self-organized mechanisms are frequently encountered in nature and known to achieve flexible, adaptive control and decision-making. Noise plays a crucial role in such systems: It can enable a self-organized system to reliably adapt to short-term changes in the environment while maintaining a generally stable behavior. This is fundamental in biological systems because they must strike a delicate balance between stable and flexible behavior. In the present paper we analyse the role of noise in the decision-making of the true slime mold Physarum polycephalum, an important model species for the investigation of computational abilities in simple organisms. We propose a simple biological experiment to investigate the reaction of P. polycephalum to time-variant risk factors and present a stochastic extension of an established mathematical model for P. polycephalum to analyze this experiment. It predicts that-due to the mechanism of stochastic resonance D noise can enable P. polycephalum to correctly assess time-variant risk factors, while the corresponding noise-free system fails to do so. Beyond the study of P. polycephalum we demonstrate that the influence of noise on self-organized decision-making is not tied to a specific organism. Rather it is a general property of the underlying process dynamics, which appears to be universal across a wide range of systems. Our study thus provides further evidence that stochastic resonance is a fundamental component of the decision-making in self-organized macroscopic and microscopic groups and organisms.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID ORCID Put Code Meyer, Bernd UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED Ansorge, Cedrick UNSPECIFIED orcid.org/0000-0001-9913-3759 UNSPECIFIED Nakagaki, Toshiyuki UNSPECIFIED orcid.org/0000-0002-3446-4888 UNSPECIFIED
URN:	urn:nbn:de:hbz:38-236236
DOI:	10.1371/journal.pone.0172933
Journal or Publication Title:	PLoS One
Volume:	12
Number:	3
Date:	2017
Publisher:	PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE
Place of Publication:	SAN FRANCISCO
ISSN:	1932-6203
Language:	English
Faculty:	Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences
Divisions:	Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences > Department of Geosciences > Institute for Geophysics and Meteorology
Subjects:	no entry
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Keywords Language NETWORK; ENVIRONMENTS; DYNAMICS; TIME; ANTS Multiple languages Multidisciplinary Sciences Multiple languages
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	http://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/id/eprint/23623