Self-organising Thermoregulatory Huddling in a Model of Soft Deformable Littermates

Abstract

Abstract. Thermoregulatory huddling behaviours dominate the early experiences of developing rodents, and constrain the patterns of sensory and motor input that drive neural plasticity. Huddling is a complex emergent group behaviour, thought to provide an early template for the development of adult social systems, and to constrain natural selection on metabolic physiology. However, huddling behaviours are governed by simple rules of interaction between individuals, which can be described in terms of the thermodynamics of heat exchange, and can be easily controlled by manipulation of the environment temperature. Thermoregulatory huddling thus provides an opportunity to investigate the effects of early experience on brain development in a social, developmental, and evolutionary context, through controlled experimentation. This paper demonstrates that thermoregulatory huddling behaviours can selforganise in a simulation of rodent littermates modelled as soft-deformable bodies that exchange heat during contact. The paper presents a novel methodology, based on techniques in computer animation, for simulating the early sensory and motor experiences of the developing rodent.

Modelling the emergence of rodent filial huddling from physiological huddling

“…A Monte Carlo algorithm has recently been shown to capture the statistics of huddling behaviour [ 20 ], i.e. the distribution of groups of pups in contact, as predicted by more elaborate models of the underlying physical interactions between littermates (see [ 18 , 19 , 47 ]). The idea is to iteratively reconfigure the distribution of pups between groups by choosing pairs of pups at random from the litter and either joining together the groups to which they belong, or isolating one from its group.…”