Constructing Stability: Optimal Learning in Noisy Ecological Niches

Lee ED, Flack JC, Krakauer DC. 2024 Constructing stabliity: optimal learning in noisy ecological niches. Proc. R. Soc. B 291: 20241606

One of my research questions is how do acquatic creatures, including but not limited to whales, learn and form representational understanding of their surroundings in dynamic and sensory rich contexts (the ever changing ocean). This paper frames two ancillary questions - how quickly should an organism respond to a changing environment and what is the optimal trade-off between remembering and forgetting?

“In real systems, a problem with the rise of stabilizing niche construction is that it creates a public good that reduces enviromental uncertainty and provides a benefit to all agents. This can be exploited by free riders - it produces a tragedy of the commons.”

A key learning to explore from this paper is “memory scales sublinearly with environmental persistence time”.