Drive competition underlies effective allostatic orchestration

Abstract

Living systems ensure their fitness by self-regulating. The optimal matching of their behavior to the opportunities and demands of the ever-changing natural environment is crucial for satisfying physiological and cognitive needs. Although homeostasis has explained how organisms maintain their internal states within a desirable range, the problem of orchestrating different homeostatic systems has not been fully explained yet. In the present paper, we argue that attractor dynamics emerge from the competitive relation of internal drives, resulting in the effective regulation of adaptive behaviors. To test this hypothesis, we develop a biologically-grounded attractor model of allostatic orchestration that is embedded into a synthetic agent. Results show that the resultant neural mass model allows the agent to reproduce the navigational patterns of a rodent in an open field. Moreover, when exploring the robustness of our model in a dynamically changing environment, the synthetic agent pursues the stability of the self, being its internal states dependent on environmental opportunities to satisfy its needs. Finally, we elaborate on the benefits of resetting the model’s dynamics after drive-completion behaviors. Altogether, our studies suggest that the neural mass allostatic model adequately reproduces self-regulatory dynamics while overcoming the limitations of previous models.

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“…In this way, it also serves as an extra layer of security for the system by integrating contextual information from the environment and using it to prevent potentially harmful situations Yang et al (2018) . At the heart of this approach is the implementation of an allostatic control system Sanchez-Fibla et al (2010) , Guerrero Rosado et al, 2022 . This system aims to ensure harm avoidance and promote cooperative behaviors, which are two fundamental aspects of ethical machine behavior Freire et al (2020a) .…”

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“…In this way, it also serves as an extra layer of security for the system by integrating contextual information from the environment and using it to prevent potentially harmful situations Yang et al (2018). At the heart of this approach is the implementation of an allostatic control system Sanchez-Fibla et al (2010), Guerrero Rosado et al, 2022 This system aims to ensure harm avoidance and promote cooperative behaviors, which are two fundamental aspects of ethical machine behavior Freire et al (2020a).…”