Sarah E. Marzen, Simon DeDeo. Journal of The Royal Society Interface (2017) (Journal of The Royal Society Interface) (local cache)

Abstract

In complex environments, there are costs to both ignorance and perception. An organism needs to track fitness-relevant information about its world, but the more information it tracks, the more resources it must devote to perception. As a first step towards a general understanding of this trade-off, we use a tool from information theory, rate-distortion theory, to study large, unstructured environments with fixed, randomly drawn penalties for stimuli confusion (‘distortions’). We identify two distinct regimes for organisms in these environments: a high-fidelity regime where perceptual costs grow linearly with environmental complexity, and a low-fidelity regime where perceptual costs are, remarkably, independent of the number of environmental states. This suggests that in environments of rapidly increasing complexity, well-adapted organisms will find themselves able to make, just barely, the most subtle distinctions in their environment.