Does diversity deliver? How variation in individual knowledge and behavioural traits impact on the performance of animal groups

多样性能带来好处吗？

• 批准号: NE/H016600/1
• 负责人: Andrew King
• 金额: $ 36.47万
• 依托单位: University of Cambridge
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Fellowship
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2011 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=NE%2FH016600%2F1
• 关键词: Does; diversity; deliver; How; variation

Have you ever been stood with a group of friends (or worse, colleagues) in an unfamiliar city trying to choose which restaurant to dine at? I expect so, but do you remember how you made your choice, all the while trying to stick together and not lose one another? There are a number of ways you could have arrived at your decision. You may have followed the decision of the group member who set-off purposefully down the High Street, or you all may have agreed to go to the restaurant declared 'the best in town' by the person with local knowledge of the city. Such situations are just as common in the animal world. Swap 'restaurant' to 'foraging patch' and we have a description for the type of foraging decisions faced by almost all social animals, every day of their lives. But these are not trivial decisions; a number of consecutive bad choices-where a group are led to poor foraging areas, or risky habitats-can be fatal. Such decisions are made even more difficult where animals face unexpected dangers or an environment which is constantly changing, something all animals are increasingly encountering in our rapidly changing world. One way animal groups may cope with uncertainty-and perform well in such environments-is by drawing upon one another's particular expertise or information, or having individuals bold enough to try out new options. For instance, we know that summing information possessed by individual group-members can increase the collective cognition of groups, a concept which has attracted much attention in the media and been termed 'the wisdom of crowds'. Larger and/or more diverse groups may also contain individuals with different skills and experiences, which increase the chances of a group solving a given task. But to date, studies that explicitly investigate the effect of such diversity on group performance have so far been restricted to human teams acting for financial gain, and have produced mixed results. In the proposed fellowship, I will use a combination of experimental and theoretical data to test the hypothesis that 'diversity delivers' in a group setting, and ask: What makes a winning team? To answer this question, I will present highly gregarious freshwater fish, the nine-spined stickleback, with a series of problems not unlike the 'which restaurant?' example I used in my opening sentences. Combining highly sophisticated video tracking of individual fishes movements, with foraging devices made using kitchen egg-timers and laboratory petri dishes, I will explore the role of variability in individual knowledge and personality. Questions I will tackle will include: If the most informed individual in a group is also the boldest in the group, does the group make more accurate decisions as a consequence of following this bold individual's choices? If a group is composed of a majority of poorly informed bold individuals and a minority of well-informed shy individuals, is the group able to utilise the information possessed by the latter? How different does a groups information or personality composition have to be before they cannot agree on a place to forage, and split up? The unique experimental set-up proposed will also allow me to measure the actual benefit to individual fish (in terms of amount of food eaten) in these different contexts. All of these experiments will take place with groups of just five fish, given the time needed to individually assess individual personality and train fish to different levels of 'expertise'. However, I will then use a series of computer simulations based on what I find in these experiments to make predictions about the outcome where shoals of fifty or a hundred individuals are concerned, which I will then test in the laboratory. Overall, this project will be the first attempt to manipulate the distribution of both information and personality within groups, and will provide a new insight into the function of diversity for social animals when coping with uncertainty.

你是否曾经在一个陌生的城市里和一群朋友(或者更糟糕的是，同事)站在一起，试图选择去哪家餐厅用餐？我想是的，但你还记得你是如何做出选择的吗？你一直试图团结在一起，不让彼此失去对方。有很多种方法可以让你做出决定。你可能遵循了团队成员的决定，他们特意沿着商业街出发，或者你们都同意去一家被当地了解这座城市的人宣布为镇上最好的餐厅。这种情况在动物世界里也很常见。把“餐馆”换成“觅食地”，我们就能描述出几乎所有群居动物每天都要面对的觅食决定。但这些不是微不足道的决定；一些连续的错误选择--一群人被带到糟糕的觅食区域或危险的栖息地--可能是致命的。当动物面临意想不到的危险或不断变化的环境时，这样的决定就变得更加困难，在我们这个快速变化的世界里，所有动物都越来越多地遇到这种情况。动物群体应对不确定性的一种方式--并在这样的环境中表现良好--是相互借鉴彼此的特定专业知识或信息，或者让个人足够大胆地尝试新的选择。例如，我们知道，总结个体群体成员拥有的信息可以增加群体的集体认知，这一概念在媒体中引起了极大的关注，并被称为群体智慧。更大和/或更多样化的团队也可能包含具有不同技能和经验的个人，这增加了团队解决特定任务的机会。但到目前为止，明确调查这种多样性对群体绩效影响的研究迄今仅限于为经济利益而行动的人类团队，并产生了好坏参半的结果。在提议的团契中，我将使用实验和理论数据相结合的方法来检验在团队环境中“多样性带来”的假设，并问：是什么造就了一个获胜的团队？为了回答这个问题，我将为大家呈现高度群居的淡水鱼--九刺刺鱼--带来的一系列问题，就像我们所说的：“哪家餐厅？”我在我的开场白中使用了一个例子。结合对单个鱼类运动的高度复杂的视频跟踪，以及使用厨房鸡蛋计时器和实验室培养皿制作的觅食设备，我将探索变异性在个人知识和个性中的作用。我要解决的问题包括：如果一个群体中最知情的个人也是这个群体中最大胆的，那么这个群体是否会因为听从这个大胆的个人的选择而做出更准确的决定？如果一个群体由大多数见多识广的大胆个人和少数见多识广的害羞个人组成，那么这个群体能够利用后者拥有的信息吗？一个群体的信息或个性构成必须有多大的不同，他们才能就觅食的地点达成一致，并分裂？建议的独特实验设置还将使我能够衡量在这些不同的背景下对个别鱼类的实际好处(根据所吃的食物量)。所有这些实验都将在只有五条鱼的鱼群中进行，因为需要时间来单独评估个人个性，并将鱼训练到不同水平的“专业知识”。然而，然后我将使用一系列基于我在这些实验中发现的计算机模拟来预测涉及到50或100个人的浅滩的结果，然后我将在实验室进行测试。总体而言，这个项目将是操纵信息和个性在群体中的分布的第一次尝试，并将为应对不确定性时社会动物多样性的作用提供新的见解。