Search

Categories and word meanings tend to be interpreted as single entities that are activated in the mind when an individual categorizes the world or uses language. We argue that this view is mistaken by using models based on neural networks and adaptive behavior simulations. Connectionist simulations of populations of organisms that live and reproduce in an environment show that categories and word meanings are open and changing collections of activation patterns in the network's internal units rather than single activation patterns.

The evolution of language implies the parallel evolution of an ability to respond appropriately to signals (language understanding) and an ability to produce the appropriate signals in the appropriate circumstances (language production). When linguistic signals are produced to inform other individuals, individuals that respond appropriately to these signals may increase their reproductive chances but it is less clear what is the reproductive advantage for the languages producers. We present simulations in which populations of neural networks living in an environment evolve a simple language with an informative function. Signals are produced to help other individuals to categorize edible and poisonous mushrooms in order to decide whether to approach or avoid encountered mushrooms. Language production, while not under direct evolutionary pressure, evolves as a by-product of the independently evolving perceptual ability to categorize mushrooms.

Liquid mixtures composed of colloidal particles and much smaller non-adsorbing linear homopolymers can undergo a gelation transition due to polymer-mediated depletion forces. We now show that the addition of linear polymers to suspensions of soft colloids having the same hydrodynamic size yields a liquid-to-gel-to-re-entrant liquid transition. In particular, the dynamic state diagram of 1,4-polybutadiene star-linear polymer mixtures was determined with the help of linear viscoelastic and small angle X-ray scattering experiments. While keeping the star polymers below their nominal overlap concentration, a gel was formed upon increasing the linear polymer content. Further addition of linear chains yielded a re-entrant liquid. This unexpected behavior was rationalized by the interplay of three possible phenomena: (i) depletion interactions, driven by the size disparity between the stars and the polymer length scale which is the mesh size of this entanglement network; (ii) colloidal deswelling due to the increased osmotic pressure exerted onto the stars; and (iii) a concomitant progressive suppression of depletion efficiency on increasing polymer concentration due to reduced mesh size, hence a smaller range of attraction. Our results unveil an exciting new way to tailor the flow of soft colloids and highlight a largely unexplored path to engineer soft colloidal mixtures., Comment: 27 pages, 5 figures

What genotypic features explain the evolvability of organisms that have to accomplish many different tasks? The genotype of behaviorally complex organisms may be more likely to encode modular neural architectures because neural modules dedicated to distinct tasks avoid neural interference, i.e., the arrival of conflicting messages for changing the value of connection weights during learning. However, if the connection weights for the various modules are genetically inherited, this raises the problem of genetic linkage: favorable mutations may fall on one portion of the genotype encoding one neural module and unfavorable mutations on another portion encoding another module. We show that this can prevent the genotype from reaching an adaptive optimum. This effect is different from other linkage effects described in the literature and we argue that it represents a new class of genetic constraints. Using simulations we show that sexual reproduction can alleviate the problem of genetic linkage by recombining separate modules all of which incorporate either favorable or unfavorable mutations. We speculate that this effect may contribute to the taxonomic prevalence of sexual reproduction among higher organisms. In addition to sexual recombination, the problem of genetic linkage for behaviorally complex organisms may be mitigated by entrusting evolution with the task of finding appropriate modular architectures and learning with the task of finding the appropriate connection weights for these architectures.