Foraging behavior in a 3-D virtual sea snail having a spiking neural network brain

This paper reports on a simulation study of foraging behavior in a 3-D virtual sea snail. The responsible circuit is composed of 8 spiking neurons which is part of a larger 37 neuron brain. The 3-D virtual environment has full soft body physics enabled and is completely defined in software. When no odor targets are available this brain implements a semi-random path foraging behavior and when targets are available this brain switches to a directed approach behavior. The core spiking neuron simulation equation is the Erlang function which is simulated as a cascade of leaky exponential functions. The use of this equation is justified by the new Soft State Automata Theory which describes causation in non-clocked mathematically discontinuous systems like the brain in which finite states cannot be defined by the system itself. The use of the Erlang function to propagate both the normal signal and the threshold response signal results in 9 neural control parameters, 7 of which may be changed adaptively.