Incidental sounds of locomotion in animal cognition

The highly synchronized formations that characterize schooling in fish and the flight of certain bird groups have frequently been explained as reducing energy expenditure. I present an alternative, or complimentary, hypothesis that synchronization of group movements may improve hearing perception. Although incidental sounds produced as a by-product of locomotion (ISOL) will be an almost constant presence to most animals, the impact on perception and cognition has been little discussed. A consequence of ISOL may be masking of critical sound signals in the surroundings. Birds in flight may generate significant noise; some produce wing beats that are readily heard on the ground at some distance from the source. Synchronization of group movements might reduce auditory masking through periods of relative silence and facilitate auditory grouping processes. Respiratory locomotor coupling and intermittent flight may be other means of reducing masking and improving hearing perception. A distinct border between ISOL and communicative signals is difficult to delineate. ISOL seems to be used by schooling fish as an aid to staying in formation and avoiding collisions. Bird and bat flocks may use ISOL in an analogous way. ISOL and interaction with animal perception, cognition, and synchronized behavior provide an interesting area for future study

Fuzzifying the thoughts of animats

Abstract. In this article we present a fuzzy logic based method for the construction of thoughts of artificial animals (animats). Due to the substantial increase of the processing power of personal computers in the last decade there was a notable progress in the field of animat construction and simulation. Regardless of the achieved results, the coding of the animat’s behaviour is very inaccurate and can, to someone not familiar with common physics variables like speed, acceleration, banking, etc., seem like pure black magic. Our leading hypothesis is, that by using linguistic programming based on common sense, unclear and even partially contradictory knowledge of dynamics, we can achieve comparable, if not better, simulation results. We begin the article with the basics of animats, continue with their fuzzyfication and end with the presentation and comparison of simulation results. 1 Introduction to Animats The research field of the construction of simple artificial life was started by J