Special issue on Swarm Cognition

Abstract

Swarm Cognition is a novel multidisciplinary approach that encompasses research in neurosciences, cognitive psychology, social ethology and swarm intelligence, with the aim of studying cognition as an emergent collective phenomenon in which perception, attention, decision making and other cognitive processes are brought forth by a multitude of elementary units tightly interacting among each other. Within the Swarm Cognition framework, a broad view of cognition is adopted, so that its definition also includes the behaviour displayed in a distributed system like an ant colony. Indeed, an ant colony can display complex cognitive functions as a result of the interactions among the system components. The parallel with brain activities is straightforward. An ant is part of a colony, much as a neuron is part of a brain. An ant cannot do much in isolation, but a colony is a highly resilient adaptive system. Similarly, a neuron is individually able to only make limited interactions with other neurons, but the brain is capable of highly complex cognitive processes. In other words, both ants and neurons behave/act in perfect harmony with other conspecifics/cells to accomplish tasks that go beyond the capability of a single individual. Out of metaphor, Swarm Cognition aims at studying cognitive processes as the emergent result of the collective dynamics in a distributed system, be the system composed of autonomous agents like ants or basic control units like neurons.

Cognición de grupo y cognición de enjambre en la solución del problema del agente viajero

“…Se ha sugerido su potencial en cuestiones como la toma de decisiones, los umbrales de consenso, los mecanismos de decisión y la relación velocidad/precisión en la decisión (Marshall et al, 2009;Newell & Lee, 2011;Trianni, 2008).…”

Procedure for resolving specification optimization task of heterogeneous robot colony

“…There are scientific papers reporting results in various aspects of the swarm robotics, like emergent behavior of the swarm (Trianni et al, 2010;Şahin, Winfield, 2008), physical design of swarm robots (Seeni, Schafer, 2010) or reconfigurable systems called multi-robot organisms (Kernbach et al, 2010). Robot swarms are being applied in various fields (Şahin, 2005), including medicine (Davies, 2010;Rogozea et al, 2010), everyday life (Hansen et al, 2010;Swangnetr et al, 2010), urban search and rescue (Wong et al, 2011) and others.…”