Motion-guided attention promotes adaptive communications during social navigation

Abstract

Animals are capable of enhanced decision making through cooperation, whereby accurate decisions can occur quickly through decentralized consensus. These interactions often depend upon reliable social cues, which can result in highly coordinated activities in uncertain environments. Yet information within a crowd may be lost in translation, generating confusion and enhancing individual risk. As quantitative data detailing animal social interactions accumulate, the mechanisms enabling individuals to rapidly and accurately process competing social cues remain unresolved. Here, we model how motion-guided attention influences the exchange of visual information during social navigation. We also compare the performance of this mechanism to the hypothesis that robust social coordination requires individuals to numerically limit their attention to a set of n-nearest neighbours. While we find that such numerically limited attention does not generate robust social navigation across ecological contexts, several notable qualities arise from selective attention to motion cues. First, individuals can instantly become a local information hub when startled into action, without requiring changes in neighbour attention level. Second, individuals can circumvent speed-accuracy trade-offs by tuning their motion thresholds. In turn, these properties enable groups to collectively dampen or amplify social information. Lastly, the minority required to sway a group's short-term directional decisions can change substantially with social context. Our findings suggest that motion-guided attention is a fundamental and efficient mechanism underlying collaborative decision making during social navigation.

Computational and robotic modeling reveal parsimonious combinations of interactions between individuals in schooling fish

“…In the rummy nose tetra (Hemigrammus rhodostomus) during collective U-turns [28,35], the analysis of directional correlations between fish suggests that each fish mainly reacts to one or two neighbors at a time [28]. These results are in line with theoretical works that have suggested that, instead of averaging the contributions of a large number of neighbors, as suggested by many models [18-20, 23, 36, 37], individuals could pay attention to only a small number of neighbors [25][26][27][28]38]. This mechanism would overcome the natural cognitive limitation of the amount of information that each individual can handle [39].…”

“…In this species, it has been shown that the transmission of behavior in a school was best described by a model in which the response probability of a fish depends on the fraction of active neighbors perceived by that fish. However, because of the cognitive load that is required for an individual to constantly monitor the movements of a large number of neighbors, it has been suggested that animals may focus their attention on a small subset of their neighbors [25][26][27]. In a previous work, we found experimental evidence that supports this assumption.…”

“…The interaction strategies that we have investigated in this work correspond to different ways for an individual to focus its attention on the stimuli (i.e., its relevant neighbors). In the context of fish schools, individuals filter the information from their environment and thus limit their attention to a small set of their most salient neighbors [25][26][27], hence giving priority to the few neighbors to be avoided (by moving away or by aligning their headings) or the ones to be followed. These few neighbors requiring an immediate action from the focal fish should, by definition, trigger a larger response than other neighbors, hence making the notion of most influential neighbors quite natural.…”

“…To prevent cognitive overload, a reasonable assumption is that individual fish filter the information from their environment and thus limit their attention to a small set of their most salient neighbors [25][26][27] (to be followed; or to be avoided, by moving away or by aligning their headings), making the notion of most influential neighbors quite natural.…”

Fore-aft asymmetric flocking

“…It is explicitly mentioned in some works [6], and implicitly present in a number of models, see, e.g. [7], and the rather complicated escape-pursuit mechanisms introduced in [8,9] to describe marching locusts, or the 'motion guided attention' of [10]. It can even be found in variants of simple flocking models such as the Vicsek model, where local alignment of constantspeed particles competes with noise [22][23][24].…”