There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
The remarkable collective action of organisms such as swarming ants, schooling fish
and flocking birds has long captivated the attention of artists, naturalists, philosophers
and scientists. Despite a long history of scientific investigation, only now are we
beginning to decipher the relationship between individuals and group-level properties.
This interdisciplinary effort is beginning to reveal the underlying principles of
collective decision-making in animal groups, demonstrating how social interactions,
individual state, environmental modification and processes of informational amplification
and decay can all play a part in tuning adaptive response. It is proposed that important
commonalities exist with the understanding of neuronal processes and that much could
be learned by considering collective animal behavior in the framework of cognitive
science.