Causal Relationships Underlying the Collective Dynamic Behavior of Swarms

群居生活给动物带来了几个好处，比如更好的喂养机会和减少捕食风险。在这两种情况下--觅食和躲避捕食者--关键信息都以非语言的方式在整个群体中以不同的时间尺度传递。虽然目前的动物行为方法允许在协调动作期间推断信息共享，但这些相互作用只是动物群体复杂行为体系中的一小部分。该奖项支持基础研究，通过整合动力系统理论和斑马鱼动物模型的行为学研究，调查集体动物行为背后的定向信息流。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性，斑马鱼正迅速成为一种有效的临床前动物模型。与这项研究相辅相成的是跨学科教育和外展活动，这些活动将培养工程学中代表性不足的学生的开创性和多学科思维，并有利于布鲁克林公立学校贫困学生的教育。该研究计划试图证明，可以使用信息论方法来衡量社会动物行为。具体地说，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。将在斑马鱼上进行一系列假设驱动的实验，通过控制同类物种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。随后，建议的无模型框架和已建立的实验范式将被用于调查浅滩斑马鱼和成群斑马鱼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，将利用基于机器人的平台、多目标跟踪软件和新的实验方案来设计和剖析因果关系，这些关系对验证设想的方法至关重要。这些实验室实验的独特数据集将支持多种理论动力系统方法的验证，以揭开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.