Sensory Perception Commonalities Across Species: Implications for Understanding and Robotics

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University have found that a wide array of organisms, extending from microscopic life forms to humans, engage in analogous movements to perceive their environment. Notably, electric knifefish modify their movement patterns based on lighting conditions to better understand their surroundings. This pattern of sensory-dependent movements is consistently observed across various species, including amoebas, bats, and humans.

The research team at Johns Hopkins discovered uniform patterns of sensory-related movements that span from microbes to humans, and they consider that these patterns have possible applications in robotic systems.

An electric knifefish moves in a specific oscillating pattern in water for the same purpose as a dog sniffing or a human looking around a new location—to interpret their environment. This is the first research to show that a broad spectrum of organisms, including those as simple as microbes, engage in comparable movement patterns to sense their world.

“Noah Cowan, a Johns Hopkins professor of mechanical engineering and one of the authors, noted, “”Even amoebas, which lack a nervous system, display behavior remarkably similar to a human’s postural balance or a fish taking refuge. These organisms are phylogenetically distant on the evolutionary tree, indicating that evolutionary processes have converged on a single solution through vastly different biological pathways.”

Published in Nature Machine Intelligence, this study also has ramifications for cognitive science and the development of robotic systems.

Movements, Perception, and Robotics Applications

The research originated from the team’s endeavor to understand what roles the nervous system plays when animals modify their movements to enhance their perception, and if these behaviors could be adapted for robotic control mechanisms.

During the observation of electric knifefish in a controlled environment, it was seen that the fish oscillated more frequently in darker conditions. In the presence of light, these rapid movements were significantly reduced.

Knifefish in natural settings use weak electrical discharges to sense their environment and seek refuge. Their rapid oscillations enable them to sense their surroundings more effectively, especially in darker waters.

Debojyoti Biswas, a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins and the study’s first author, stated, “Our findings suggest that the optimal strategy involves temporarily switching to an exploratory mode when faced with high levels of uncertainty, and then reverting to an exploitative mode once uncertainty is reduced.”

Inter-Species Behavioral Linkages

For the first time, this study has deciphered a strategy of mode-switching in fish and has connected this behavior across different species. The researchers created a computational model to simulate key sensing behaviors and, drawing on work from other laboratories, identified the same sensory-dependent behaviors in other species, from amoebas to humans.

Cowan added, “Every single study we reviewed aligned with the behavioral rules we discovered in electric knifefish, even when it came to single-celled organisms like amoebas responding to an electric field.”

The research team is in the initial stages of understanding how animals unconsciously control sensing movements. They hypothesize that all organisms possess neurological calculations that manage uncertainty.

Cowan elaborated, “For instance, if you observe people in a grocery store line, you’ll see shifts between stationary and moving behaviors. We believe this is fundamentally similar to the behavior we observed in the knifefish. Our research suggests that the statistical properties of such movements are universally present across a multitude of species, including humans.”

The findings of this study have prospective applications in the enhancement of autonomous robotic systems such as search and rescue drones or space rovers. The researchers plan to test the applicability of their findings across other forms of life, including plants.

The study is authored by researchers from several institutions, including the University of Minnesota Minneapolis, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Cornell University, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Funding for the research was provided by the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation.

Reference: “Mode switching in organisms for solving explore-versus-exploit problems,” published on 26 October 2023 in Nature Machine Intelligence. DOI: 10.1038/s42256-023-00745-y.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about sensory-dependent movements

More about sensory-dependent movements

• Johns Hopkins University Official Website
• Nature Machine Intelligence Journal
• Office of Naval Research
• National Science Foundation
• Overview of Sensory Perception in Biology
• Introduction to Cognitive Science
• Robotics and Autonomous Systems
• Evolutionary Convergence