Dartmouth Events

Please join us in Moore BO3 on Thursday, November 7, 2024, starting at 1:05 p.m., for a colloquium given by Malcolm Maclver, Professor of Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University.

Title:   How Does the Brain Control Facial Movement? The Ecological Induction of Cognition: Paleontology, AI-powered Predator Prey Simulations, and Experiments with Mice and Spiders

Abstract:  The water-to-land transition around 350 million years ago had several notable consequences. We have shown that the volume of space where something can be visually detected increased a million-fold, due to the higher transparency of air to light compared to water and a tripling of eye sizes we showed occurred in the initial “fishapod” terrestrial vertebrates. Computational simulations using planning algorithms from AI have shown that in predator-prey interactions, living in the mix of long sightline (over open spaces) and short sightlines (hiding behind obstacles/vegetation) creates a survival benefit for a different form of learning: rather than trial and error, imagining different outcomes and selecting the one with higher benefit, also called planning. This is particularly valuable when the outcome may be irreversible, such as with the mortal outcomes of predator-prey interactions, since trial and error learning is otherwise an effective strategy. The surprising conclusion, if true, is that planning systems comprise a survival circuit for terrestrial life. In this talk, we detail experimental and computational work ongoing to explore this hypothesis, particularly a large, highly automated arena with variable spatial complexity that features an autonomous robot predator that pursues rodents attempting to reach a reward. The one terrestrial invertebrate with vertebrate-like visual acuity---­Portia---is reported to plan, in an interesting test case of the idea that planning emerges with large sensory horizons. We discuss initial field work on this animal.

Coffee, tea, and cider donuts will be available a few minutes before and after the talk in the foyer space outside of Moore BO3.