Project description
How ants teach us about self-repair
In contrast to machines, which often fail to recover from defects, living organisms exhibit remarkable resilience, evolving to adapt and self-repair over time. This phenomenon, akin to a ‘melody that sings itself’, remains poorly understood, especially regarding how brains and behaviours evolve. The ERC-funded RESILI-ANT project is exploring resilience through the lens of solitary foraging ants. Ants, with their complex yet accessible navigational behaviours, offer a unique opportunity to study self-development and recovery mechanisms. By leveraging their rapid developmental stages and simpler brain structures, RESILI-ANT combines ecological research, complexity science, and technologies like virtual reality to dissect these mechanisms. This approach aims to enhance our understanding of neural plasticity and evolutionary processes.
Objective
Organisms differ from machines in their resilience: their capacity to spontaneously recover from defects. This is because organisms, contrary to machines, are self-developing systems that change over time, like ‘a melody that sings itself’. The plastic mechanisms that enable animal and human self-development and resilience is barely known, but understanding them would profoundly impact how we apprehend brains, behaviours and their evolution. RESILI-ANT will tackle this question using the stunning ability of solitary foraging ants to visually navigate in complex environments. Ant navigational behaviours develop through stages with strong learning components, and can recover from sensory-motor alterations that would disable any machine. The advantage is that the full ontogeny of these behaviours unfolds in a couple of days, can be easily manipulated, and involves a brain numerically much simpler and better-known than any vertebrate. We will combine an ecological approach, complexity science and modelling with state-of-the-art technologies to dissect the mechanisms underlying these behavioural developmental processes. We will track ant ontogeny under different scenarios; perform straightforward manipulations to disclose the underlying rules; and use virtual reality to probe their ability to compensate for severe sensory-motor defects. In parallel, we will explore how these processes are implemented – in the light of our ever-increasing knowledge of insect circuits – by augmenting our current neural models with network plasticity and recurrent connections between brain areas. The evolutionary causes and consequences of such plastic neural topologies will be investigated using neuro-evolution algorithms selecting for self-developing agents that forage in reconstructed environments. The dialogue between simulations and observation will move us towards a concrete understanding of the self-developing nature, and their fundamental and societal impact.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesmathematicspure mathematicstopology
- natural sciencesbiological scienceszoologyentomology
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
75794 Paris
France