Related papers: Subcritical escape waves in schooling fish
It has long been hypothesized that operating close to the critical state is beneficial for natural and artificial systems. We test this hypothesis by evolving foraging agents controlled by neural networks that can change the system's…
Individual computations and social interactions underlying collective behavior in groups of animals are of great ethological, behavioral, and theoretical interest. While complex individual behaviors have successfully been parsed into small…
Fish schooling is often modeled with self-propelled particles subject to phenomenological behavioral rules. Although fish are known to sense and exploit flow features, these models usually neglect hydrodynamics. Here, we propose a novel…
The vicinity of phase transitions selectively amplifies weak stimuli, yielding optimal sensitivity to distinguish external input. Along with this enhanced sensitivity, enhanced levels of fluctuations at criticality reduce the specificity of…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
Collective motion provides a spectacular example of self-organization in Nature. Visual information plays a crucial role among various types of information in determining interactions. Recently, experiments have revealed that organisms such…
This paper studies a stylized model of local interaction where agents choose from an ever increasing set of vertically ranked actions, e.g. technologies. The driving forces of the model are infrequent upward shifts (``updates''), followed…
Collective behaviour in living systems is observed across many scales, from bacteria to insects, to fish shoals. Zebrafish have emerged as a model system amenable to laboratory study. Here we report a three-dimensional study of the…
Recent progress in diverse intelligence has shown simple learning capacities below the organism level - single cells and even molecular networks. However, there are still many knowledge gaps around learning capacity above the organism…
The critical state is assumed to be optimal for any computation in recurrent neural networks, because criticality maximizes a number of abstract computational properties. We challenge this assumption by evaluating the performance of a…
Collective decision-making arises from individual agents integrating their own personal observations with information obtained from social partners. In many biological systems that exhibit collective decision-making, the process by which…
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…
Collective motion is one of the most ubiquitous behaviours displayed by social organisms and has led to the development of numerous models. Recent advances in the understanding of sensory system and information processing by animals impel…
Over the last decade new technologies for making large numbers of fine-grained measurements have led to the surprising discovery that many biological systems sit near a critical point. These systems are potentially more adaptive in that…
Many-variable differential equations with random coefficients provide powerful models for the dynamics of many interacting species in ecology. These models are known to exhibit a dynamical phase transition from a phase where population…
We present a novel model of stochastic differential equations for foraging behavior of fish schools in space including obstacles. We then study the model numerically. Three configurations of space with different locations of food resource…
Behavioral contagion and the presence of behavioral cascades are natural features in groups of animals showing collective motion, such as schooling fish or grazing herbivores. Here we study empirical behavioral cascades observed in fish…
Many migratory animals regularly travel thousands of kilometers, exactly finding their destinations. It is assumed that migrants have both a compass sense to hold their course, and a map sense --- a kind of "biological" GPS --- to correct…
Navigating toward a known target in a noisy environment is a fundamental problem shared across biological, physical, and engineered systems. Although optimal strategies are often framed in terms of continuous, fine-grained feedback, we show…
Experiments suggest that cerebral cortex gains several functional advantages by operating in a dynamical regime near the critical point of a phase transition. However, a long-standing criticism of this hypothesis is that critical dynamics…