Collective learning and decision-making in animal groups

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Animals that live in groups - including humans - must, in the interests of maintaining the cohesion of the group, strike a balance between making decisions based entirely on their own preferences and compromising to incorporate the information held by other group members. How groups achieve this balance is a key question in the study of animal behavior and in cognitive and social psychology. The proposed studies examine how cognitive functions are shaped by occurring within a group context through experiments with schools of small tropical fish (zebrafish) making collective decisions and navigating in mazes. The decisions made by animals in groups depend not only on their own preferences but also on the behavioral decisions of others. The connection between behavior and cognition is therefore less direct in groups. For example, behavioral choices lead to certain experiences, and these experiences determine what parts of its environment an individual has the opportunity to learn about. Individuals in groups may make consensus choices they would have preferred to avoid if alone and this will alter what they learn and how they choose in the future. Similar processes will affect attention, perception, and decision making. The studies in the current proposal explore and quantify these collective cognitive processes. The individuals that make up any group differ in their physical and cognitive characteristics. Fish have been shown to have ‘personalities’ and the proposed studies will investigate how these consistent individual differences affect collective behavior. Certain individuals might prefer to inhabit different positions within the group - nearer the front, for example - and this could affect their ability to lead the group or their likelihood of being separated from it. Bolder or more aggressive individuals may also attempt to dictate the group’s decisions. In addition, it is possible that the success of a group depends in part on its personality composition, such that more diverse groups - e.g., containing both bold and shy members - are more successful or successful across a wider range of environmental conditions. By explicitly measuring individual personality and manipulating the compositions of groups, the proposed studies will allow us to identify the role of individual differences in the kinds of collective decisions groups make and the speed and accuracy with which they do so. Though the mechanisms of collective behavior in fish are certainly very different from those that shape human social behavior, the underlying challenges that the groups face are similar: how to compromise between the preferences of all members of the group while remaining cohesive; how to partition limited resources; and how to make inclusive decisions quickly and efficiently. The proposed studies will explore how some species solve these problems and may shed light on the origins of human social structures.