Neuromodulators can have a strong effect on how organisms cooperate and compete for resources. To better understand the effect of neuromodulation on cooperative behavior, a computational model of the dopaminergic and serotonergic systems was constructed and tested in games of conflict and cooperation. This neural model was based on the assumptions that dopaminergic activity increases as expecte...

One of the best examples of traditional analysis of evolutionary stable strategies (ESS) is provided by the so called Dove-Hawk model. In this paper we present several enhancements to the model aimed at describing the evolution of cooperative behavior. In addition to Doves and Hawks we introduce several groups of Cooperators, who act as Doves within their own group, but as Hawks outside it. Thi...

Animals can often coordinate their actions to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. However, this can result in a social dilemma when uncertainty about the behavior of partners creates multiple fitness peaks. Strategies that minimize risk ("risk dominant") instead of maximizing reward ("payoff dominant") are favored in economic models when individuals learn behaviors that increase their payoffs...

Recent research focuses on animal personalities, that is individual differences in behaviour that are consistent across contexts and over time. From an adaptive perspective, such limited behavioural plasticity is surprising, since a more flexible structure of behaviour should provide a selective advantage. Here, we argue that consistency can be advantageous because it makes individuals predicta...

Social interactions among animals can take many forms. While some animals are known to cooperate with each other, others are characterised by dominance hierarchies. This thesis is concerned with the study of these two forms of social organisation amongst animal groups. We model the problem using a game-theoretic framework. We investigate the evolution of animal behaviour under the influence of ...

In Evolutionary Biology and Game Theory, there is a long history of models aimed at predicting strategies adopted by agents during resource foraging. In Artificial Life, the agentbased modeling approach allowed to simulate the evolution of foraging behaviors in populations of artificial agents embodied in a simulated environment. In this paper, different sets of behaviors are evolved from a sim...

We present a novel hybrid modelling framework that takes into account two aspects which have been largely neglected in previous models of spatial evolutionary games: random motion and chemotaxis. A stochastic individual-based model is used to describe the player dynamics, whereas the evolution of the chemoattractant is governed by a reaction-diffusion equation. The two models are coupled by der...

Personality differences can be found in a wide range of species across the animal kingdom, but why natural selection gave rise to such differences remains an open question. Frequency-dependent selection is a potent mechanism explaining variation; it does not explain, however, the other two key features associated with personalities, consistency and correlations. Using the hawk-dove game and a f...

Models of cultural evolution study how the distribution of cultural traits changes over time. The dynamics of cultural evolution strongly depends on the way these traits are transmitted between individuals by social learning. Two prominent forms of social learning are payoff-based learning (imitating others that have higher payoffs) and conformist learning (imitating locally common behaviours)....