Causal Relationships Underlying the Collective Dynamic Behavior of Swarms

群居生活给动物提供了一些好处，比如更好的觅食机会和减少被捕食的风险。在这两种情况下——觅食和躲避捕食者——关键信息在不同的时间尺度上以非语言的方式在整个群体中传递。虽然目前动物行为学的方法允许在协调机动过程中推断信息共享，但这些相互作用只是动物群体复杂行为的一小部分。该奖项通过对斑马鱼动物模型的动力系统理论和行为研究的整合，支持研究集体动物行为的定向信息流的基础研究。这项研究的意义在行为脑研究和神经心理生物学领域具有潜在的变革意义，在这些领域，斑马鱼正迅速成为有效的临床前动物模型。与研究相辅相成的是跨学科的教育和推广活动，这些活动将培养工程专业中代表性不足的学生的创新思维和多学科思维，并使布鲁克林公立学校中贫困学生的教育受益。这个研究项目旨在证明一种信息论的方法可以用来衡量社会动物的行为。具体来说，该奖项将建立一个严格的无模型框架来研究动物相互作用中的因果关系。将在斑马鱼身上进行一系列假设驱动的实验，通过控制同种动物之间的视觉反馈和使用独立控制的机器人复制品来强调单向信息传递。在此基础上，本文提出的无模型框架和已建立的实验范式将用于研究斑马鱼在鱼群和鱼群中的信息流以及个体差异对其集体行为的社会影响。为了实现这一目标，基于机器人的平台、多目标跟踪软件和新的实验协议将用于工程和剖析因果关系，这是验证所设想方法的核心。来自这些实验室实验的独特数据集将支持验证众多理论动力系统方法，以揭示复杂生物和技术系统中的因果关系。

Living in groups affords several benefits for animals such as better feeding opportunities and reduced predation risks. In both instances-foraging and predator avoidance-critical information is transmitted nonverbally throughout the group, at different time scales. While current methods in animal behavior allow for inferring information sharing during coordinated maneuvers, these interactions are only a small subset of the complex behavioral repertoire of animal groups. This award supports fundamental research to investigate directional information flow underlying collective animal behavior, through the integration of dynamical systems theory and behavioral studies on the zebra fish animal model. The implications of this research are potentially transformative in the area of behavioral brain research and neuropsychobiology, where zebra fish is rapidly emerging as a valid preclinical animal model. Complementing the research are interdisciplinary education and outreach activities that will foster outside-the-box and multidisciplinary thinking in underrepresented students in engineering, and benefit the education of underprivileged students in Brooklyn public schools.This research program seeks to demonstrate that an information-theoretic approach can be used to measure social animal behavior. Specifically, this award will establish a rigorous model-free framework to study causal relationships in animal interactions. A series of hypothesis-driven experiments on zebra fish will be conducted to emphasize unidirectional information transfer by controlling visual feedback between conspecifics and using independently controlled robotic replicas. Subsequently, the proposed model-free framework and established experimental paradigms will be used to investigate information flow in shoaling and schooling zebra fish along with the social implications of individual differences on their collective behavior. Toward this aim, robotics-based platforms, multi-target tracking software, and novel experimental protocols will be utilized for engineering and dissecting causal relationships that are central to the validation of the envisioned approach. The unique datasets from these laboratory experiments will support the validation of a multitude of theoretical dynamical-systems approaches toward unraveling causality in complex biological and technological systems.