Noise improves collective decision-making by ants in dynamic environments

Dussutour, Audrey; Beekman, Madeleine; Nicolis, Stamatios C.; Meyer, Bernd

doi:10.1098/rspb.2009.1235

Cited by 82 publications

(68 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…Furthermore, if experienced individuals have a disproportionate influence over the group's behavior, then the growth rate of the group (and thus, the rate of new, inexperienced individuals joining the group) may be particularly important during group ontogeny, as it would alter the ratio of experienced to inexperienced individuals. Alternatively, if collective behavior is the result of a decentralized process, where individuals respond to changing conditions based upon previously established rules (innate or learned) or fluctuating feedback systems, this may either lead to more stabilized (if individual behaviors are buffered by the group; Dussutour et al, 2009;Sasaki and Pratt, 2011) or destabilized (if positive feedback processes lead to exaggeration of small effects; Sinha, 2006) collective personality.…”

Section: Defining and Evaluating Collective Personalitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The development of collective personality: the ontogenetic drivers of behavioral variation across groups

2014

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For the past decade, the study of personality has become a topic on the frontier of behavioral ecology. However, most studies have focused on exploring inter-individual behavioral variation in solitary animals, and few account for the role that social interactions may have on the development of an individual's personality. Moreover, a social group may exhibit collective personality: an emergent behavioral phenotype displayed at the group-level, which is not necessarily the sum or average of individual personalities within that group. The social environment, in many cases, can determine group success, which then influences the relative success of all the individuals in that group. In addition, group-level personality may itself evolve, subject to the same selection pressures as individual-level behavioral variation, when the group is a unit under selection. Therefore, we reason that understanding how collective personalities emerge and change over time will be imperative to understanding individual-and group-level behavioral evolution. Personality is considered to be fixed over an individual's lifetime. However, behavior may shift throughout development, particularly during adolescence. Therefore, juvenile behavior should not be compared with adult behavior when assessing personality. Similarly, as conditions within a group and/or the local environment can shift, group behavior may similarly fluctuate as it matures. We discuss potential within-group factors, such as group initiation, group maturation, genetic make-up of the group, and the internal social environment, and external factors, such as how local environment may play a role in generating group-level personalities. There are a variety of studies that explore group development or quantify group personality, but few that integrate both processes. Therefore, we conclude our review by discussing potential ways to evaluate development of collective personality, and propose several focal areas for future research.

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Section: Defining and Evaluating Collective Personalitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The development of collective personality: the ontogenetic drivers of behavioral variation across groups

2014

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“…Particularly collective decision making in social groups is often driven by self-organizing processes. Some of the most prominent examples of this are found in social insects, for example the choice of nest sites [2] and food sources [3,4] by ant colonies and the aggregation behavior of bees [5]. Countless other examples of self-organized collective decision making exist in both biological and human social systems, such as in quorum sensing in bacteria colonies [6] and in trend setting and following in economic markets [7].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This positive feedback is counterbalanced by negative feedbacks, namely the evaporation of pheromone and overcrowding. The balance between these two influences leads to a stable yet flexible decision system [3,4]. Arguably the most common approach to the analysis of such coupled feedback systems is via differential equation systems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Model of Symmetry Breaking in Collective Decision-Making

Hamann

Meyer

Schmickl

2010

From Animals to Animats 11

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Abstract. Symmetry breaking is commonly found in self-organized collective decision making. It serves an important functional role, specifically in biological and bio-inspired systems. The analysis of symmetry breaking is thus an important key to understanding self-organized decision making. However, in many systems of practical importance available analytic methods cannot be applied due to the complexity of the scenario and consequentially the model. This applies specifically to selforganization in bio-inspired engineering. We propose a new modeling approach which allows us to formally analyze important properties of such processes. The core idea of our approach is to infer a compact model based on stochastic processes for a one-dimensional symmetry parameter. This enables us to analyze the fundamental properties of even complex collective decision making processes via Fokker-Planck theory. We are able to quantitatively address the effectiveness of symmetry breaking, the stability, the time taken to reach a consensus, and other parameters. This is demonstrated with two examples from swarm robotics.

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“…Solomon (1992), for example, appeals to a form of mandevillian intelligence when he suggests that "cognitive bias and belief perseverance on the part of geologists during the geological revolution was, contrary to what might be expected, in fact conducive to scientific success" (p. 443). There is even evidence to suggest that mandevillian-like mechanisms may underlie the forms of collective intelligence exhibited by eusocial insects (Weidenmüller and Seeley 1999;Dussutour et al 2009). There is, as such, every reason to think that the concept of mandevillian intelligence helps to identify a phenomenon that is shared by a rich array of materially-disparate collective organizations, ranging from collections of purely synthetic cognitive agents, through to human teams and animal communities.…”

Section: Vice Virtue and Mandevillian Intelligencementioning

confidence: 99%

Mandevillian Intelligence

Smart¹

2018

Oxford Scholarship Online

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Mandevillian intelligence is a specific form of collective intelligence in which individual cognitive vices (i.e., shortcomings, limitations, constraints and biases) are seen to play a positive functional role in yielding collective forms of cognitive success. The present paper introduces the concept of mandevillian intelligence and reviews a number of strands of empirical research that help to shed light on the phenomenon. The paper also attempts to highlight the value of the concept of mandevillian intelligence from a philosophical, scientific and engineering perspective. Inasmuch as we accept the notion of mandevillian intelligence, then it seems that the cognitive and epistemic value of a specific social or technological intervention will vary according to whether our attention is focused at the individual or collective level of analysis. This has a number of important implications for how we think about the design and evaluation of collective cognitive systems. For example, the notion of mandevillian intelligence forces us to take seriously the idea that the exploitation (or even the accentuation) of individual cognitive shortcomings could, in some situations, provide a productive route to collective forms of cognitive and epistemic success.

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Noise improves collective decision-making by ants in dynamic environments

Cited by 82 publications

References 47 publications

The development of collective personality: the ontogenetic drivers of behavioral variation across groups

The development of collective personality: the ontogenetic drivers of behavioral variation across groups

A Model of Symmetry Breaking in Collective Decision-Making

Mandevillian Intelligence

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