Behavior, Propagates at the speed of ... salience evaluation.

In my research investigating the seeds of cognitive dynamics and the importance of emotion toward that emergence I looked closely at how the fundamental limits of physical systems in the form of the cells that store differential information about our experiences set the ultimate bounds on what those dynamics can be.

I came over the last decade to the hard conclusion that the game theoretic possibilities that emrege from these dynamics are the toolkit from which any physical system for cognition must employ to build solutions. As a result ...knowing how such agents interact is fundamental to determining how a corpus of such agents in the form of a densely connected brain of such cells will or will not emerge a range of cognitive expressions.


When I formalized the principle hypothesis of the salience theory of dynamic cognition the high level description asserted the importance of physical embedding to the driving dynamics of cognition. How this embedding and consequent embodiment of agents in a world space necessitates cognitive dynamics to promote survival...but for larger brains...in social animals...a much more varied behavior map is possible one which can often lead to behaviors that are immediately anti-survival for individuals in a group. The sacrificial responses of a host of species demonstrate this emerged anti-survival behavior. In all cases the purpose is to push the stone forward as it were ...for the next generation. Spiders dying in order to be the food of their young, Penguins risking life and limb to bring back gullets of fish for their growing chicks on vast ice flows....to mother Bears risking shot gun blasts to attack humans that stray too close to their cubs.


Ultimately the choices these animals make come from a selection of options their limited cognitive nodes and the driving autonomic and base emotional drivers enable them to exhibit. I have written extensively on the importance of base emotion to behavior in the salience theory articles , those can be read here:


https://www.facebook.com/notes/david-saintloth/discovering-the-dynamic-cognition-cycle/10152513149708057

Most proximal to this new research is the conclusion I reached regarding how brain size is a direct driver for the emergence of altruism, which is the super set of behaviors that include sacrificial responses. My conclusion that bigger brains allow for more complex choice maps which in a social constraint of limited resources emerges cooperation is a strategy for group survival that biases from the selfish tendencies of individual survival absent the group.

So in essence the idea of the Nash equilibrium but built continuously into the behavioral map of species and varied depending on the size of their brains.

http://sent2null.blogspot.com/2015/08/altruism-emergent-quality-of-having-big.html


This paper presents evidence that the rate of spreading of social signals is fast in bees...reading this it seemed clear this would be so. Bees have very simple brains...their cognitive dynamics are highly reactionary and chemical dependent...they have very little to no internal dialogue driven by a complex salience landscape as variably all higher animals do...I would assert then that observing animal species that are social and watching how such signals spread will likely find a correlation between the amount of choices that are possible from their salience cores of their brains and the speed at which emerged signals propagate through groups.


The reason is that more cognitively adept agents weigh more options and time weighing options means time not propagating the signal...the more options are to be weighed and the longer they are weighed the longer it takes to move on to action.


A study that observes the emergence and spread of notable signals in other species could tease out this relationship. I am guessing that because the increase in choice response is non linear with the number of options within a salient dimension by the number of salient dimensions that the response is exponential (as it seems so many natural systems are).




The paper:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EHEzJrNMY6gLCWsvk1_kuoTesNCay3gK/view?usp=sharing