Related papers: The emergence of unshared consensus decisions in b…
Social animals have to take into consideration the behaviour of conspecifics when making decisions to go by their daily lives. These decisions affect their fitness and there is therefore an evolutionary pressure to try making the right…
Techniques recently developed for the analysis of human social networks are applied to the social network of bottlenose dolphins living in Doubtful Sound, New Zealand. We identify communities and subcommunities within the dolphin population…
Many complex networks, including human societies, the Internet, the World Wide Web and power grids, have surprising properties that allow vertices (individuals, nodes, Web pages, etc.) to be in close contact and information to be…
For group-living animals, reaching consensus to stay cohesive is crucial for their fitness, particularly when collective motion starts and stops. Understanding the decision-making at individual and collective levels upon sudden disturbances…
The mechanisms of echo-processing were investigated in our experiments, conducted on bottlenose dolphins. Hierarchically organized system of independent dimensions, describing echoes in animals perception, was revealed. The rules of…
How do social animals make effective decisions in the absence of a leader? While coordination can improve accuracy, it also introduces delays as information propagates through the group. In changing environments, these delays can outweigh…
In primate groups, collective movements are typically described as processes dependent on leadership mechanisms. However, in some species, decision-making includes negotiations and distributed leadership. These facts suggest that simple…
Collective movement can be achieved when individuals respond to the local movements and positions of their neighbours. Some individuals may disproportionately influence group movement if they occupy particular spatial positions in the…
When humans move in a shared space, they choose navigation strategies that preserve their mutual safety. At the same time, each human seeks to minimise the number of modifications to her/his path. In order to achieve this result, humans use…
One of the most impressive features of moving animal groups is their ability to perform sudden coherent changes in travel direction. While this collective decision can be a response to an external perturbation, such as the presence of a…
Since steep declines in a population's size also typically alter its composition, population bottlenecks are considered highly important for evolution. However, despite such significance, the mechanisms governing the impact of a given…
Collective animal movements produce spectacular natural phenomena that arise from simple local interactions among group members. Flocks of homing pigeons, Columba livia, provide a useful model for the study of collective motion and decision…
Moving groups are routinely faced with a choice of different routes as part of their daily lives, such as choosing between exits from a building. Differences in moving speeds and environmental constraints often lead to individuals being…
Marine mammal biomechanics research has focused on straight-line swimming at consistent speeds, resulting in a lack of knowledge about how animals select movement strategies to balance cost vs performance during tasks like cornering. In…
Collective motion of bird flocks can be explained via the hypothesis of many wrongs, and/or, a structured leadership mechanism. In pigeons, previous studies have shown that there is a well-defined hierarchical structure and certain specific…
Animals living in groups make movement decisions that depend, among other factors, on social interactions with other group members. Our present understanding of social rules in animal collectives is mainly based on empirical fits to…
In this paper, we investigate the role of uninformed individuals in consensus formation within opinion-swarming models for self-propelled particles. The proposed models are inspired by empirical observations in animal swarming, particularly…
Collective motion is abundant in nature, producing a vast amount of phenomena which have been studied in recent years, including the landing of flocks of birds. We investigate the collective decision making scenario where a flock of birds…
The emergence of collective decision in swarms and their coordinated response to complex environments underscore the central role played by social transmission of information. Here, the different possible origins of information flow…
The data describing a process of echo-image formation in bottlenose dolphin sonar perception were accumulated in our experimental explorations. These data were formalized mathematically and used in the computational model, comparative…