“Where is Vicente going? Where are people going”. With this phrase the proverb picks up one of the basic principles of collective behavior, since social animals focus on how others behave to make certain decisions. Scientists from the Cajal Institute (CSIC) have deduced for the first timea mathematical equation that collects the rules by which collective behavior is governed. The work has been published in the latest issue of the magazinePLoS Computational Biology.
Thesocial animalsdo not make decisions in isolation, but rather withina context that depends on the behavior of others. This is how a group acts in a coordinated way, leading to collective behavior.
After obtaining the new rules, the CSIC researchers Alfonso Pérez Escudero and Gonzalo García de Polavieja put them to the test with existing experimental data on thespiny fish ( Gasterosteus aculeatus ). And they confirmed that their rules predicted the results of all experiments. “Fish, as social animals that they are, use the behavior of others to improve their own decisions. Their survival depends largely on estimates. For example, they probabilistically estimate if there is food in a place by what they see of that place and by how many animals are already going there and to other places “, the CSIC researchers clarify.
Theway of behaving of otherstherefore provides acontinuous stream of indirect information about the environment. The ambiguity of the sensory data and the limited capacity to process all that information means that there is some uncertainty when making decisions.
According to the CSIC, the work will serve as the basis for future research on the importance of estimates in the search for a partner or food and in the functioning of the brain. “Our analysis allows us to continue studying whether collective social behavior arises from a host of factors, including memory, learning and the way of perceiving,” say García de Polavieja and Pérez Escudero. “Now we can do brain manipulation experiments to see how all these elements intermingle,” they add.
