Clark Kevin B
Commun Integr Biol. 2012 Jan 1;5(1):3-11. doi: 10.4161/cib.18337.
Ciliates become highly social, even displaying animal-like qualities, in the joint presence of aroused conspecifics and nonself mating pheromones. Pheromone detection putatively helps trigger instinctual and learned courtship and dominance displays from which social judgments are made about the availability, compatibility, and fitness representativeness or likelihood of prospective mates and rivals. In earlier studies, I demonstrated the heterotrich Spirostomum ambiguum improves mating competence by effecting preconjugal strategies and inferences in mock social trials via behavioral heuristics built from Hebbian-like associative learning. Heuristics embody serial patterns of socially relevant action that evolve into ordered, topologically invariant computational networks supporting intra- and intermate selection. S. ambiguum employs heuristics to acquire, store, plan, compare, modify, select, and execute sets of mating propaganda. One major adaptive constraint over formation and use of heuristics involves a ciliate's initial subjective bias, responsiveness, or preparedness, as defined by Stevens' Law of subjective stimulus intensity, for perceiving the meaningfulness of mechanical pressures accompanying cell-cell contacts and additional perimating events. This bias controls durations and valences of nonassociative learning, search rates for appropriate mating strategies, potential net reproductive payoffs, levels of social honesty and deception, successful error diagnosis and correction of mating signals, use of insight or analysis to solve mating dilemmas, bioenergetics expenditures, and governance of mating decisions by classical or quantum statistical mechanics. I now report this same social bias also differentially affects the spatiotemporal sparseness, as measured with metric entropy, of ciliate heuristics. Sparseness plays an important role in neural systems through optimizing the specificity, efficiency, and capacity of memory representations. The present findings indicate sparseness performs a similar function in single aneural cells by tuning the size and density of encoded computational architectures useful for decision making in social contexts.
在受到刺激的同种生物和非自身交配信息素共同存在的情况下，纤毛虫会变得高度社会化，甚至表现出类似动物的特质。信息素检测可能有助于触发本能的和习得的求偶及支配行为展示，据此对潜在配偶和竞争对手的可获得性、兼容性以及健康代表性或可能性做出社会判断。在早期研究中，我证明了异毛类的模糊旋口虫通过在模拟社会试验中运用基于类赫布联想学习构建的行为启发式策略来实现婚前策略和推理，从而提高交配能力。启发式策略体现了与社会相关行为的序列模式，这些模式演变成有序的、拓扑不变的计算网络，支持配偶内部和配偶之间的选择。模糊旋口虫利用启发式策略来获取、存储、规划、比较、修改、选择和执行一系列交配宣传行为。对启发式策略的形成和使用的一个主要适应性限制涉及纤毛虫最初的主观偏见、反应性或准备状态，这是由史蒂文斯主观刺激强度定律定义的，用于感知细胞间接触和其他围交配事件伴随的机械压力的意义。这种偏见控制着非联想学习的持续时间和效价、寻找合适交配策略的搜索率、潜在的净生殖回报、社会诚实和欺骗的程度、成功的交配信号错误诊断和纠正、运用洞察力或分析来解决交配困境、生物能量消耗以及经典或量子统计力学对交配决策的管控。我现在报告，这种相同的社会偏见也会以不同方式影响纤毛虫启发式策略的时空稀疏性（用度量熵来衡量）。稀疏性在神经系统中通过优化记忆表征 的特异性、效率和容量发挥重要作用。目前的研究结果表明，稀疏性在单个无神经细胞中通过调整对社会背景下决策有用的编码计算架构 的大小和密度发挥类似功能。
