Com els processos cognitius dirigeixen el moviment en els éssers vius: una aproximació de la física estadística des de l'individu fins al col·lectiu
- Autores: Javier Cristín Redondo
- Directores de la Tesis: Daniel Campos Moreno (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2021
- Idioma: catalán
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: María del Carmen Miguel López (presid.), Alvaro Corral Cano (secret.), Cristóbal López Sánchez (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Física por la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX
- Resumen
Living organisms are characterized by their ability to adapt themselves to the circumstances. Bacteria, for example, are able to detect chemical signal gradients with the purpose of reorienting themselves. Ants in a colony organize themselves to distribute tasks, even to develop strategies that are unfeasible at an individual level. Even humans adapt continually our behavior to our dynamic context. This adaptation, based on the ability to incorporate and process information, represents the germ of intelligent behavior.
In this thesis we have focused on providing a physical framework to describe some aspects of those mechanisms. More concretely, we have used tools from statistical physics to describe, in an effective way, the cognitive mechanisms that the organisms use to obtain and process information in the context of search or foraging processes.
Our framework allows to analyze the impact of multiple cognitive layers over the organisms navigation during these processes.
The thesis has been divided into two parts. During the first one, we explore how the cognitive layers impact the search process efficiency in absence of interactions with other individuals. We illustrate how the cognitive memory and the prospection (the ability to sample the future) can represent fundamental ingredients to describe the behavior of living organisms. In addition, we provide experimental evidence that seemingly indicates that how humans quantify when the information of those layers is reliable enough (and then, to make a decision) can be effectively described by a simple mechanism based on concepts from information theory.
In the second part, we focus on the collective organization exhibited by a broad range of living organisms and how it emerges from the interactions between them. More concretely, we explore if the framework proposed for isolated individuals can be useful to describe these situations. We provide multiple evidence in this direction, putting our effort in two systems: pedestrian dynamics and ant foraging. For the first, we characterize how the balance between the basic ingredients of pedestrian motion may generate collective structures and how a description in a specific space (the time-to-collision space) can adequately capture these structures. For the second, it is known that ants cooperate while foraging to increase the colony survival. We explore how a better comprehension of the complexity of collective foraging strategies can be gained with the help of spin-glass frameworks.
In summary, this thesis illustrates how the understanding of the cognitive mechanisms of living beings can be approached through models based on statistical physics.
