DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Learning and Collective Intelligence in Animal Groups

该项目研究了群体中的动物如何集体了解其环境，以及这种学习过程如何产生“集体智慧”，从而使群体能够做出比任何单个个体更准确的决策。大多数社会性动物，例如鱼类，其沟通和协调手段非常有限，目前尚不清楚这些动物是否能够在这些限制下学会利用潜在的集体智慧。该项目将开发集体学习的理论模型，初步结果表明，已知在独居动物中普遍存在的相同学习规则在群体环境中也可以非常有效，并且可以导致集体智慧接近最佳水平，即使个体之间的协调有限。然后，将使用两种社会动物物种：鱼类和人类，对集体学习模型的具体预测进行实验测试。通过使用两个截然不同的物种，可以测试模型的通用性，并揭示集体学习的一般机制。这些实验将为动物群体的学习过程提供重要的见解，而此前这一过程尚未被探索过。他们还可能对人类如何在群体环境中学习提供具体的见解，并可能提出提高人类群体集体学习效率的技术。

This project examines how animals in groups collectively learn about their environment and how this learning process may result in "collective intelligence", whereby the group can make more accurate decisions than any single individual can. Most social animals, such as fish, have very limited means of communication and coordination, and it is currently unknown whether these animals can learn to exploit the potential collective intelligence under these constraints. This project will develop a theoretical model of collective learning, and preliminary results suggest that the same learning rules known to be ubiquitous in solitary animals can also be highly efficient in a group context and can lead to near-optimal levels of collective intelligence, even with limited coordination between individuals. The specific predictions of the collective learning model will then be experimentally tested using two social animal species: fish and humans. By using two very different species, the generality of the model can be tested, and general mechanisms of collective learning will be uncovered. These experiments will provide important insights into the learning process in animal groups, which has previously been unexplored. They may also give specific insight into how humans learn in a group context and may suggest techniques to increase the efficiency of collective learning in human groups.