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Biological and social scientists have long been interested in understanding how to reconcile individual and collective interests in iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Many effective strategies have been proposed, and they are often categorized…
Understanding social interaction within groups is key to analyzing online communities. Most current work focuses on structural properties: who talks to whom, and how such interactions form larger network structures. The interactions…
Scale-free foraging patterns are widespread among animals. These may be the outcome of an optimal searching strategy to find scarce randomly distributed resources, but a less explored alternative is that this behaviour may result from the…
Evolutionary game theory offers a general framework to study how behaviors evolve by social learning in a population. This body of theory can accommodate a range of social dilemmas, or games, as well as real-world complexities such as…
The ability to capture detailed interactions among individuals in a social group is foundational to our study of animal behavior and neuroscience. Recent advances in deep learning and computer vision are driving rapid progress in methods…
We present a general framework for modeling a wide selection of flocking scenarios under free boundary conditions. Several variants have been considered - including examples for the widely observed behavior of hierarchically interacting…
To identify genetic changes underlying dog domestication and reconstruct their early evolutionary history, we analyzed novel high-quality genome sequences of three gray wolves, one from each of three putative centers of dog domestication,…
Marmoset monkeys encode vital information in their calls and serve as a surrogate model for neuro-biologists to understand the evolutionary origins of human vocal communication. Traditionally analyzed with signal processing-based features,…
We study a simple model of a forager as a walk that modifies a relaxing substrate. Within it simplicity, this provides an insight on a number of relevant and non-intuitive facts. Even without memory of the good places to feed and no…
Environment plays a fundamental role in the competition for resources, and hence in the evolution of populations. Here, we study a well-mixed, finite population consisting of two strains competing for the limited resources provided by an…
We introduce a novel approach to studying animal behaviour and the context in which it occurs, through the use of microphone backpacks carried on the backs of individual free-flying birds. These sensors are increasingly used by animal…
Swarming is a conspicuous behavioural trait observed in bird flocks, fish shoals, insect swarms and mammal herds. It is thought to improve collective awareness and offer protection from predators. Many current models involve the hypothesis…
Biodiversity monitoring using audio recordings is achievable at a truly global scale via large-scale deployment of inexpensive, unattended recording stations or by large-scale crowdsourcing using recording and species recognition on mobile…
Dogs exhibit an exceptional range of morphological diversity as a result of their long-term association with humans. Attempts to identify when dog morphological variation began to expand have been constrained by the limited number of…
Animals that travel together in groups display a variety of fascinating motion patterns thought to be the result of delicate local interactions among group members. Although the most informative way of investigating and interpreting…
The processes leading to change in languages are manifold. In order to reduce ambiguity in the transmission of information, agreement on a set of conventions for recurring problems is favored. In addition to that, speakers tend to use…
Foraging, either solitarily or collectively, is a necessary behavior for survival that is demonstrated by many organisms. Foraging can be collectively optimized by utilizing communication between the organisms. Examples of such…
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…
Previous human foraging experiments have shown that human groups routinely undermatch environmental resources much like other animal species. In this experiment, we test whether humans also selectively rely on others as information sources…
A pervasive belief with regard to the differences between human language and animal vocal sequences (song) is that they belong to different classes of computational complexity, with animal song belonging to regular languages, whereas human…