Research

Populations with reinforced phenotypic plasticity

Inherited memory, individual behaviour and population selection.

Inherited strategies and reinforcement along a branching genealogy.
Reinforcement updates an inherited strategy along each lineage of a branching population.

I study populations in which individuals inherit information about the actions of their ancestors. Reinforcement couples this memory to future decisions, while reproduction and selection act at the population level.

The aim is to understand the long-time behaviour of these systems and to connect ancestral learning with models of phenotypic plasticity. Questions include the growth of the population, the strategies selected over time, and the trajectories of typical ancestral lineages.

Related directions concern intrinsic motivation and curiosity: how can selection–mutation algorithms explore a state space while retaining a diversity of behaviours?

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