CAREER: The effects of power, support, and information on animal social dynamics

职业：权力、支持和信息对动物社会动态的影响

• 批准号: 2239099
• 负责人: Elizabeth Hobson
• 金额: $ 160万
• 依托单位: University of Cincinnati Main Campus
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-07-01 至 2028-06-30
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2239099&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; effects; power; support; information

Social species can benefit in many ways from living in social groups, but these groups are also dynamic and change over time, which requires individuals to navigate a constantly changing social environment. The direction and magnitude of social changes can be difficult to predict but are important to understand because they can strongly affect each animal’s health, reproductive success, and survival as well as group-level social predictability and resilience. This project focuses on testing how aggression and power, affiliation and social support, and social connectedness and information may individually (or in combination) affect the social dynamics of groups, using the socially and cognitively complex monk parakeet as the study species. The study capitalizes on captive parakeet colonies to take an experimental approach that involves detailed behavior data collection. The project carries themes of social networks, behavioral interactions, and cutting-edge analytical approaches over to the educational side by developing a new educational tool to improve data science education and workforce development for biology students as well as providing structured mentoring opportunities for recently-graduated students as a pathway to graduate school and networked peer mentoring opportunities for graduate students.Understanding how power, support, and information interact within dynamic social system is crucial to predicting how these systems evolve, collapse, and thrive in group-living species as well as the connections between sociality and cognition. The proposed work aims to fill gaps in the current state of knowledge of animal sociality by systematically manipulating power, support, and information in groups of captive monk parakeets. This research tests the central hypothesis that power, support, and information are essential factors in explaining social dynamics in socially and cognitively complex species. In Aim 1, a 2x2 experimental design will be used to manipulate support and information in captive parakeet groups to test for independent and combined effects of support and information on power dynamics. In Aim 2, information will be manipulated using experimental group fission-fusions to evaluate how birds react to a lack of information with information-gathering behaviors. In Aim 3, agent-based models will be used to test how variation in cognitive skills and information use affects power dynamics, social resiliency, and recovery speed more generally across species. In the Educational Plan, this research on animal sociality will be integrated with education using the “Sociality Game”, an online multiplayer game which uses engaging questions about animal sociality to teach students quantitative analyses, the fundamentals of data science, and R coding skills.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

社会物种可以通过生活在社会群体中而在很多方面受益，但这些群体也是动态的，并且随着时间的推移而变化，这要求个体适应不断变化的社会环境。社会变化的方向和幅度可能难以预测，但理解很重要，因为它们可以强烈影响每只动物的健康、繁殖成功和生存以及群体层面的社会可预测性和复原力。该项目的重点是测试攻击性和权力、归属感和社会支持以及社会联系和信息如何单独（或组合）影响群体的社会动态，使用社会和认知复杂的僧侣鹦鹉作为研究物种。该研究利用圈养长尾小鹦鹉群落，采取了涉及详细行为数据收集的实验方法。该项目将社交网络、行为互动和尖端分析方法的主题带到了教育方面，通过开发一种新的教育工具来改善生物学学生的数据科学教育和劳动力发展，并为应届毕业生提供结构化的指导机会，作为进入研究生院的途径，并为研究生提供网络化的同伴指导机会。了解动态社会系统中的权力、支持和信息如何相互作用对于预测这些系统如何演变至关重要， 群居物种以及社会性和认知之间的联系崩溃并繁荣。这项工作旨在通过系统地操纵圈养僧侣鹦鹉群体的力量、支持和信息来填补当前动物社会性知识的空白。这项研究检验了一个中心假设，即权力、支持和信息是解释社会和认知复杂物种的社会动态的基本因素。在目标 1 中，将使用 2x2 实验设计来操纵圈养长尾小鹦鹉群体中的支持和信息，以测试支持和信息对权力动态的独立和综合影响。在目标 2 中，将使用实验组裂变融合来操纵信息，以评估鸟类如何通过信息收集行为对信息缺乏做出反应。在目标 3 中，基于主体的模型将用于测试认知技能和信息使用的变化如何影响物种之间的权力动态、社会弹性和恢复速度。在教育计划中，这项关于动物社会性的研究将通过“社交游戏”与教育相结合，这是一款在线多人游戏，利用有关动物社会性的引人入胜的问题来教授学生定量分析、数据科学基础知识和 R 编码技能。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。