Individual and collective encoding of risk in animal groups
Abstract
Many biological systems exhibit an emergent ability to process information about their environment. This collective cognition emerges as a result of both the behavior of system components and their interactions, yet the relative importance of the two is often hard to disentangle. Here, we combined experiments and modeling to examine how fish schools collectively encode information about the external environment. We demonstrate that risk is predominantly encoded in the physical structure of groups, which individuals modulate in a way that augments or dampens behavioral cascades. We show that this modulation is necessary for behavioral cascades to spread and that it allows collective systems to be responsive to their environments even without changes in individual computation.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Sep 23, 2019
- Source ID
- 10.1073/pnas.1905585116
Entities
People
- Bryan C Daniels
- Colin R Twomey
- Iain Couzin
- Joseph Bak-Coleman
- Matthew M. G. Sosna
- Pawel Romanczuk
- Winnie Poel
Organizations
- German Research Foundation
- Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
- Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior
- National Science Foundation
- Office of Naval Research
- Princeton University
- University of Konstanz
- University of Pennsylvania