Reactive, Proactive, and Inductive Agents: An evolutionary path for biological and artificial spiking networks

Complex environments provide structured yet variable sensory inputs. To best exploit information from these environments, organisms must evolve the ability to correctly anticipate consequences of unknown stimuli, and act on these predictions. We propose an evolutionary path for neural networks, leading an organism from reactive behavior to simple proactive behavior and from simple proactive behavior to induction-based behavior. Through in-vitro and in-silico experiments, we define the minimal conditions necessary in a network with spike-timing dependent plasticity for the organism to go from reactive to proactive behavior. Our results support the existence of small evolutionary steps and four necessary conditions allowing embodied neural networks to evolve predictive and inductive abilities from an initial reactive strategy. We extend these conditions to more general structures.