Henrik Olsson, Mirta Galesic

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Belief dynamics has an important role in shaping our responses to natural and societal phenomena, ranging from climate change and pandemics to immigration and conflicts. Researchers often base their models of belief dynamics on analogies to other systems and processes, such as epidemics or ferromagnetism. Similar to other analogies, analogies for belief dynamics can help scientists notice and study properties of belief systems that they would not have noticed otherwise (conceptual mileage). However, forgetting the origins of an analogy may lead to some less appropriate inferences about belief dynamics (conceptual baggage). Here, we review various analogies for modeling belief dynamics, discuss their mileage and baggage, and offer recommendations for using analogies in model development.

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Chantal Nguyen, Imri Dromi, Ahron Kempinski, Gabriella E. C. Gall, Orit Peleg, and Yasmine Meroz
Phys. Rev. X 14, 031027

Circumnutations are widespread in plants and typically associated with exploratory movements; however, a quantitative understanding of their role remains elusive. In this study we report, for the first time, the role of noisy circumnutations in facilitating an optimal growth pattern within a crowded group of mutually shading plants. We revisit the problem of self-organization observed for sunflowers, mediated by shade response interactions. Our analysis reveals that circumnutation movements conform to a bounded random walk characterized by a remarkably broad distribution of velocities, covering 3 orders of magnitude. In motile animal systems such wide distributions of movement velocities are frequently identified with enhancement of behavioral processes, suggesting that circumnutations may serve as a source of functional noise. To test our hypothesis, we developed a Langevin-type parsimonious model of interacting growing disks, informed by experiments, successfully capturing the characteristic dynamics of individual and multiple interacting plants. Employing our simulation framework we examine the role of circumnutations in the system, and find that the observed breadth of the velocity distribution represents a sharp transition in the force-noise ratio, conferring advantageous effects by facilitating exploration of potential configurations, leading to an optimized arrangement with minimal shading. These findings represent the first report of functional noise in plant movements and establish a theoretical foundation for investigating how plants navigate their environment by employing computational processes such as task-oriented processes, optimization, and active sensing. Since plants move by growing, space and time are coupled, and dynamics of self-organization lead to emergent 3D patterns. As such, this system provides conceptual insight for other interacting growth-driven systems such as fungal hyphae, neurons and self-growing robots, as well as active matter systems where agents interact with past trajectories of their counterparts, such as stigmergy in social insects. This foundational insight has implications in statistical physics, ecological dynamics, agriculture, and even swarm robotics.

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Ricard Sole, Nuria Conde , Jordi Pla Mauri , Jordi Garcia Ojalvo , Nuria Montserrat , Michael Levin

Multicellularity is one of the major evolutionary transitions, and its rise provided the ingredients for the emergence of a biosphere inhabited by complex organisms. Over the last decades, the potential for bioengineering multicellular systems has been instrumental in interrogating nature and exploring novel paths to regeneration and disease, as well as cognition and behaviour. Here, we provide a list of open problems that encapsulate many of the ongoing and future challenges in the field, and we suggest conceptual approaches that may facilitate progress.

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