title: Weak universality in sensory tradeoffs.
abstract: For many organisms, the number of sensory neurons is largely determined during development, before strong environmental cues are present. This is despite the fact that environments can fluctuate drastically both from generation to generation and within an organism's lifetime. How can organisms get by by hard coding the number of sensory neurons? We approach this question using rate-distortion theory. A combination of simulation and theory suggests that when environments are large, the rate-distortion function-a proxy for material costs, timing delays, and energy requirements-depends only on coarse-grained environmental statistics that are expected to change on evolutionary, rather than ontogenetic, time scales.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics, Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.|Physics of Living Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
authors.forename: Sarah
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Marzen
authors.affiliation: Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, Department of Informatics, Indiana University, 919 East 10th Street, Bloomington, Indiana 47408, USA.|Department of Social and Decision Sciences, 5000 Forbes Avenue, BP 208, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, USA.|Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501, USA.
authors.forename: Simon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: DeDeo
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D005075:Biological Evolution; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004777:Environment; D011984:Sensory Receptor Cells / Q000502:physiology*