Ant colonies outperform individuals when a sensory discrimination task is difficult but not when it is easy

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Volumn 110, Issue 34, 2013, Pages 13769-13773

  Sasaki, Takao ^a   Granovskiy, Boris ^b   Mann, Richard P ^b   Sumpter, David J T ^b   Pratt, Stephen C ^a  

^a ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UPPSALA UNIVERSITY   (Sweden)

Author keywords

Biological complexity; Group cognition; Psychophysics; Social insects

Indexed keywords

ANT; ARTICLE; DISCRIMINATIVE STIMULUS; ISOLATION PROCEDURE; MATHEMATICAL MODEL; NONHUMAN; PERCEPTION; POSITIVE FEEDBACK; PRIORITY JOURNAL; QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS; TASK PERFORMANCE;

BIOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY; GROUP COGNITION; PSYCHOPHYSICS; SOCIAL INSECTS;

ANIMAL COMMUNICATION; ANIMALS; ANTS; CHOICE BEHAVIOR; DISCRIMINATION (PSYCHOLOGY); FEEDBACK; GROUP PROCESSES; MODELS, BIOLOGICAL; NESTING BEHAVIOR;

EID: 84882790062     PISSN: 00278424     EISSN: 10916490     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1304917110     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. Ward AJW, Sumpter DJT, Couzin ID, Hart PJB, Krause J (2008) Quorum decisionmaking facilitates information transfer in fish shoals. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 105(19): 6948-6953.
2. Woolley AW, Chabris CF, Pentland A, Hashmi N, Malone TW (2010) Evidence for a collective intelligence factor in the performance of human groups. Science 330 (6004):686-688.
3. Couzin ID (2009) Collective cognition in animal groups. Trends Cogn Sci 13(1):36-43.
4. Nakagaki T, Yamada H, Tóth Á (2000) Maze-solving by an amoeboid organism. Nature 407(6803):470.
5. Surowiecki J (2005) The Wisdom of Crowds (Random House, New York).
6. Krause J, Ruxton GD, Krause S (2010) Swarm intelligence in animals and humans. Trends Ecol Evol 25(1):28-34.
7. Seeley TD (2010) Honeybee Democracy (Princeton Univ Press, Princeton).
8. Galton F (1907) Vox populi. Nature 75:450-451.
9. King AJ, Cowlishaw G (2007) When to use social information: The advantage of large group size in individual decision making. Biol Lett 3(2):137-139.
10. Lorenz J, Rauhut H, Schweitzer F, Helbing D (2011) How social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 108(22):9020-9025.
11. Biro D, Sumpter DJT, Meade J, Guilford T (2006) From compromise to leadership in pigeon homing. Curr Biol 16(21):2123-2128.
12. Sumpter DJT (2010) Collective Animal Behavior (Princeton Univ Press, Princeton).
13. Condorcet M (1785) Essay sur l"application de l"analyse de la probabilité des decisions: Redues et pluralité des voix (Imprimerie Royale, Paris).
14. Simons AM (2004) Many wrongs: The advantage of group navigation. Trends Ecol Evol 19(9):453-455.
15. Hamilton WJ (1967) Social aspects of bird orientation mechanisms. Animal Orientation and Navigation, ed Strom RM (Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, OR), pp 57-71.
16. Wallraff H (1978) Social interrelations involved in migratory orientation of birds: Possible contribution of field studies. Oikos 30(2):401-404.
17. Kerr NL, Tindale RS (2004) Group performance and decision making. Annu Rev Psychol 55:623-655.
18. Bahrami B, et al. (2012) What failure in collective decision-making tells us about metacognition. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 367(1594):1350-1365.
19. Janis IL (1972) Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (Houghton Mifflin, Oxford).
20. Conradt L, Roper TJ (2005) Consensus decision making in animals. Trends Ecol Evol 20(8):449-456.
21. Detrain C, Deneubourg JL (2006) Self-organized structures in a superorganism: Do ants "behave" like molecules? Phys Life Rev 3(3):162-187.
22. Dussutour A, Fourcassié V, Jeanson R (2012) Key factors for the emergence of collective decision in invertebrates. Front Neurosci 6:121.
23. Goss S, Aron S, Deneubourg JL, Pasteels JM (1989) Self-organized shortcuts in the Argentine ant. Naturwissenschaften 76(12):579-581.
24. Mallon E, Pratt SC, Franks NR (2001) Individual and collective decision-making during nest site selection by the ant Leptothorax albipennis. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 50(4): 352-359.
25. Franks NR, Dornhaus A, Fitzsimmons JP, Stevens M (2003) Speed versus accuracy in collective decision making. Proc Biol Sci 270(1532):2457-2463.
26. Franks NR, Mallon E, Bray H, Hamilton M (2003) Strategies for choosing between alternatives with different attributes: Exemplified by house-hunting ants. Anim Behav 65(1):215-223.
27. Pratt SC (2005) Behavioral mechanisms of collective nest-site choice by the ant Temnothorax curvispinosus. Insectes Soc 52(4):383-392.
28. Pratt SC, Sumpter DJT, Mallon E (2005) An agent-based model of collective nest choice by the ant Temnothorax albipennis. Anim Behav 70(5):1023-1036.
29. Dornhaus A, Franks NR (2006) Colony size affects collective decision-making in the ant Temnothorax albipennis. Insectes Soc 53(4):420-427.
30. Pratt SC (2008) Efficiency and regulation of recruitment during colony emigration by the ant Temnothorax curvispinosus. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 62(8):1369-1376.
31. Franks NR, Pratt SC, Mallon EB, Britton NF, Sumpter DJT (2002) Information flow, opinion polling and collective intelligence in house-hunting social insects. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 357(1427):1567-1583.
32. Pratt SC, Mallon E, Sumpter DJT, Franks NR (2002) Quorum sensing, recruitment, and collective decision-making during colony emigration by the ant Leptothorax albipennis. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 52(2):117-127.
33. Pratt SC (2005) Quorum sensing by encounter rates in the ant Temnothorax albipennis. Behav Ecol 16(2):488-496.
34. Sasaki T, Pratt SC (2011) Emergence of group rationality from irrational individuals. Behav Ecol 22(2):276-281.
35. Sasaki T, Pratt SC (2012) Groups have a larger cognitive capacity than individuals. Curr Biol 22(19):R827-R829.
36. Fechner G (1966) Elements of Psychophysics (Holt, Rinehart, &Winston, New York), Vol I.
37. Gescheider G (1997) Psychophysics: The Fundamentals (Lawrence Erlbaum Associated, Mahwah, New Jersey).
38. Chittka L, Spaethe J, Schmidt A, Hickerlsberger A (2001) Cognitive Ecology of Pollination: Animal Behaviour and Floral Evolution, eds Chittka L, Thomson JD (Cambridge Univ Press, Cambridge, UK), pp 106-126.
39. Dyer AG, Chittka L (2004) Biological significance of distinguishing between similar colours in spectrally variable illumination: Bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) as a case study. J Comp Physiol A Neuroethol Sens Neural Behav Physiol 190(2):105-114.
40. Dyer AG, Spaethe J, Prack S (2008) Comparative psychophysics of bumblebee and honeybee colour discrimination and object detection. J Comp Physiol A Neuroethol Sens Neural Behav Physiol 194(7):617-627.
41. Wichmann FA, Hill NJ (2001) The psychometric function: I. Fitting, sampling, and goodness of fit. Percept Psychophys 63(8):1293-1313.
42. Sumpter DJT, Pratt SC (2009) Quorum responses and consensus decision making. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 364(1518):743-753.
43. Chittka L, Skorupski P, Raine NE (2009) Speed-accuracy tradeoffs in animal decision making. Trends Ecol Evol 24(7):400-407.
44. Marshall JAR, Dornhaus A, Franks NR, Kovacs T (2006) Noise, cost and speed-accuracy trade-offs: Decision-making in a decentralized system. J R Soc Interface 3(7): 243-254.
45. Passino K, Seeley TD (2006) Modeling and analysis of nest-site selection by honeybee swarms: The speed and accuracy trade-off. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 59(3):427-442.
46. Marshall JAR, et al. (2009) On optimal decision-making in brains and social insect colonies. J R Soc Interface 6(40):1065-1074.
47. Sumpter DJT, Zabzina N, Nicolis S (2012) Six predictions about the decision making of animal and human groups. Managerial and Decision Economics 33(5-6):295-309.
48. Milgram S, Bickman L, Berkowitz L (1969) Note on the drawing power of crowds of different size. J Pers Soc Psychol 13(2):79-82.
49. Amé JM, Halloy J, Rivault C, Detrain C, Deneubourg JL (2006) Collegial decision making based on social amplification leads to optimal group formation. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 103(15):5835-5840.
50. Sherman G, Visscher PK (2002) Honeybee colonies achieve fitness through dancing. Nature 419(6910):920-922.
51. Dornhaus A, Chittka L (2004) Information flow and regulation of foraging activity in bumble bees (Bombus spp.). Apidologie (Celle) 35(2):183-192.
52. Mackay C (1841) Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Wordsworth Editions Limited, Ware, UK).
53. Pinter-Wollman N, Hubler J, Holley J, Franks NR, Dornhaus A (2012) How is activity distributed among and within tasks in Temnothorax ants? Behav Ecol Sociobiol 66(10):1407-1420.
54. Bhatkar A, Whitcomb WH (1970) Artificial diet for rearing various species of ants. Fla Entomol 53(4):229-232.