Collective Behavior From Cells to Societies: Interdisciplinary Research Team Summaries (2015) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
IDR Team Summary 4: Develop general principles to understand the interplay between individual variation and group function.
IDR Team Summary 4: Develop general principles to understand the interplay between individual variation and group function.
Pages 43-56
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 43... ...
Do individuals retain their preferences and tendencies after joining the group, or does the "group mentality" and social environment override these differences? To address these questions, we must be able to track individuals and their behavioral preferences before and after joining the group, understand the mechanisms that create individual variation, examine the effects of social environment on individual variation, and study the consequences of individual variation for the group.
|
From page 44... ...
Individual variation appears to play a largely positive role in establishing and maintaining successful social groups. Based on their differing response thresholds, individuals will segregate themselves among different tasks, with certain individuals preferentially performing specific tasks.
|
From page 45... ...
The advent of modern feedback control systems along with advances in computational powers of miniaturized electronics has made modern robots a lot more artificially intelligent. This allows them to perform tasks based on their own sensing of their surroundings and potentially perceived outcomes.
|
From page 46... ...
, do individuals have inherent biases to join the group or do the collective behavior and its associated signals simply override any individual behaviors? Once in the group, are there still individual differences?
|
From page 47... ...
IDR TEAM MEMBERS -- GROUP A Guy Bloch, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Iain D Couzin, Princeton University Delphine Dean, Clemson University Deborah M
|
From page 48... ...
From ants to naked mole rats, assemblages of diverse individuals throughout nature often navigate social environments, producing behaviors best understood on the group level. Studying a single ant in isolation, for instance, yields little insight into an entire ant colony's maintenance regimen, but studying a teeming anthill in action does.
|
From page 49... ...
To understand schools of fish, then, one must understand how individual fish can act, how a school of fish is structured through time, and how both are situated within a body of water full of resources and threats. Individuals' response thresholds for various stimuli -- from both the social network and the nonsocial environment -- depend upon the interplay between an individual's genetic predispositions and how they interact with the individual's world.
|
From page 50... ...
Fluidity is how much and how rapidly an individual's place within a network can change through time. Multicellular tissues and biofilms, for instance, exhibit complex dynamics -- a result of individuals' varying response thresholds and diverse environmental stimuli -- but these systems network structures are fairly static and grid-like.
|
From page 51... ...
These systems display low fluidity and low network connectivity, as the team defined them. Other systems studied by team members seemed to fit along the continuum of increasing network connectivity and increasing fluidity.
|
From page 52... ...
Ouellette, Yale University Noa Pinter-Wollman, University of California, San Diego Jeremy Van Cleve, University of Kentucky IDR TEAM SUMMARY -- GROUP 4B Claudia Lutz, NAKFI Science Writing Scholar University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Develop general principles to understand the interplay between individual variation and group function. In collective behavior, the combined actions of the members of a group yield outcomes that differ from the sum of those same individuals acting alone -- sometimes in desirable or dramatic ways.
|
From page 53... ...
Generalizable Terms for Addressing the Challenge IDR Team 4B considered a broad range of examples of collective behavior, including both groups of living organisms and groups of robots. To come up with principles of group function that were generalizable across all cases, the team focused on the most basic elements of collective behavior: Individual variation is the degree to which individual members of a group vary in their performance of a behavior.
|
From page 54... ...
This group of "well-connected" fish will maintain a cohesive school indistinguishable from the first group of identical fish, even though the mechanisms that produced this result are very different. Considering the dynamics of the well-connected school suggested a second hypothesis: Increased individual variation requires an increased level of interactions to maintain group cohesion.
|
From page 55... ...
The result of collective behavior might also be very complex; building a termite mound, for example, is not easy to break down into the behavior of many individual group members. The team considered the impacts of these sources of complexity on the relationship between individual variation in behavior and group function, and proposed a third hypothesis: In group functions with greater complexity, increased individual variation can increase the likelihood that at least one member of the group possesses behavioral rules needed to perform that function.
|
From page 56... ...
. Conclusions The hypotheses and framework proposed by IDR Team 4B can be used in the future to create predictions about the role of individual variation and interactions in specific examples of collective behavior.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.