Bodily motion fluctuation improves reaching success rate in a neurophysical agent via geometric-stochastic resonance.

Abstract

Organisms generate a variety of noise types, including neural noise, sensory noise, and noise resulting from fluctuations associated with movement. Sensory and neural noises are known to induce stochastic resonance (SR), which improves information transfer to the subjects control systems, including the brain. As a consequence, sensory and neural noise provide behavioral benefits, such as stabilization of posture and enhancement of feeding efficiency. In contrast, the benefits of fluctuations in the movements of a biological system remain largely unclear. Here, we describe a novel type of noise-induced order (NIO) that is realized by actively exploiting the motion fluctuations of an embodied system. In particular, we describe the theoretical analysis of a feedback-controlled embodied agent system that has a geometric end-effector. Furthermore, through several numerical simulations we demonstrate that the ratio of successful reaches to goal positions and capture of moving targets are improved by the exploitation of motion fluctuations. We report that reaching success rate improvement (RSRI) is based on the interaction of the geometric size of an end-effector, the agents motion fluctuations, and the desired motion frequency. Therefore, RSRI is a geometrically induced SR-like phenomenon. We also report an interesting result obtained through numerical simulations indicating that the agents neural and motion noise must be optimized to match the prey's motion noise in order to maximize the capture rate. Our study provides a new understanding of body motion fluctuations, as they were found to be the active noise sources for a behavioral NIO.