To cooperatively transport a large load, it is important that carriers conform in their efforts and align their forces. A downside of behavioural conformism is that it may decrease the group's responsiveness to external information. Combining experiment and theory, we show how ants optimize collective transport. On the single-ant scale, optimization stems from decision rules that balance individuality and compliance. Macroscopically, these rules poise the system at the transition between random walk and ballistic motion where the collective response to the steering of a single informed ant is maximized. We relate this peak in response to the divergence of susceptibility at a phase transition. Our theoretical models predict that the ant-load system can be transitioned through the critical point of this mesoscopic system by varying its size; we present experiments supporting these predictions. Our findings show that efficient group-level processes can arise from transient amplification of individual-based knowledge.

Most people have great difficulty in recalling unrelated items. For example, in free recall experiments, lists of more than a few randomly selected words cannot be accurately repeated. Here we introduce a phenomenological model of memory retrieval inspired by theories of neuronal population coding of information. The model predicts nontrivial scaling behaviors for the mean and standard deviation of the number of recalled words for lists of increasing length. Our results suggest that associative information retrieval is a dominating factor that limits the number of recalled items.

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The mechanisms underlying the collective motion of molecular motors in living cells are not yet fully understood. One such open puzzle is the observed pulses of backward-moving myosin-X in the filopodia structure. Motivated by this phenomenon we introduce two generalizations of the 'total asymmetric exclusion process' (TASEP) that might be relevant to the formation of such pulses. The first is adding a nearest-neighbours attractive interaction between motors, while the second is adding an internal degree of freedom corresponding to a processive and immobile form of the motors. Switching between the two states occurs stochastically, without a conservation law. Both models show strong deviations from the mean field behaviour and lack particle-hole symmetry. We use approximations borrowed from the research on vehicular traffic models to calculate the current and jam size distribution in a system with periodic boundary conditions and introduce a novel modification to one of these approximation schemes. Acknowledgment 15 Appendix A. Details of two-cluster calculation for the r-model 15 Appendix B. Proof that the two-cluster solution is the exact solution of the r-model 17 Appendix C. Details of the two-particle system, in the s-model 19 Appendix D. Details of the modified car oriented mean field calculation for the s-model 20 References 21

Collective decision-making regarding direction of travel is observed during natural motion of animal and cellular groups. This phenomenon is exemplified, in the simplest case, by a group that contains two informed subgroups that hold conflicting preferred directions of motion. Under such circumstances, simulations, subsequently supported by experimental data with birds and primates, have demonstrated that the resulting motion is either towards a compromise direction or towards one of the preferred targets (even when the two subgroups are equal in size). However, the nature of this transition is not well understood. We present a theoretical study that combines simulations and a spin model for mobile animal groups, the latter providing an equilibrium representation, and exact solution in the thermodynamic limit. This allows us to identify the nature of this transition at a critical angular difference between the two preferred directions: in both flocking and spin models the transition coincides with the change in the group dynamics from Brownian to persistent collective motion. The groups undergo this transition as the number of uninformed individuals (those in the group that do not exhibit a directional preference) increases, which acts as an inverse of the temperature (noise) of the spin model. When the two informed subgroups are not equal in size, there is a tendency for the group to reach the target preferred by the larger subgroup. We find that the spin model captures effectively the essence of the collective decision-making transition and allows us to reveal a noise-dependent trade-off between the decision-making speed and the ability to achieve majority (democratic) consensus.