Collective learning and decision-making in animal groups

生活在群体中的动物，包括人类，为了保持群体的凝聚力，必须在完全基于自己的偏好做出决定和妥协以纳入其他群体成员所掌握的信息之间取得平衡。群体如何达到这种平衡是动物行为研究以及认知和社会心理学中的一个关键问题。这些研究的目的是通过实验研究群体环境下的认知功能是如何形成的。实验中，成群的小型热带鱼（斑马鱼）进行集体决策，并在迷宫中航行。动物在群体中做出的决策不仅取决于它们自己的偏好，还取决于其他动物的行为决策。因此，行为和认知之间的联系在群体中就不那么直接了。例如，行为选择导致某些经验，而这些经验决定了个体有机会了解其环境的哪些部分。群体中的个体可能会做出他们在独处时宁愿避免的共识选择，这将改变他们所学到的东西以及他们未来的选择方式。类似的过程会影响注意力、感知和决策。目前的研究计划探索并量化了这些集体认知过程。组成任何群体的个体在身体和认知特征上都是不同的。鱼类已被证明具有个性，拟议中的研究将调查这些一致的个体差异如何影响集体行为。例如，某些个体可能更喜欢在群体中靠近前线的位置，这可能会影响他们领导群体的能力，或者影响他们脱离群体的可能性。此外，一个群体的成功可能部分取决于其个性构成，因此，更多样化的群体，例如，包含大胆和害羞的成员更成功或在更广泛的环境条件下更成功。通过明确测量个体个性和操纵群体的组成，拟议中的研究将使我们能够确定个体差异在群体做出的集体决策中的作用，以及他们这样做的速度和准确性。尽管鱼类的集体行为机制肯定与塑造人类社会行为的机制非常不同，但群体面临的潜在挑战是相似的：如何在集团所有成员的偏好之间达成妥协，同时保持凝聚力;如何分配有限的资源;以及如何快速有效地做出包容性决策。这项研究将探索一些物种如何解决这些问题，并可能揭示人类社会结构的起源。

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.