Recorded 25 September 2024. Dora Biro of the Rochester Institute of Technology presents "Scaling up from individual to collective cognition" at IPAM's Analyzing High-dimensional Traces of Intelligent Behavior Workshop.
Abstract: Living in groups poses a range of challenges and opportunities, in which individual perceptual and cognitive powers can be pooled to give rise to complex collective outcomes. For example, how animals travelling in groups collectively perceive, map, and orient through space addresses enduring questions in animal navigation and collective decision-making, while inter-group variation in behavioural “traditions” underscores the profound influence of the social context on the emergence and maintenance of learnt behaviour. I will illustrate these examples with research in avian and primate study systems to highlight how advances in biologging technologies (on-board GPS, head-mounted sensors, accelerometers) and other remote sensing and data processing techniques (camera traps, AI-based automated video analysis) can now provide us with varied novel insights into animal behaviour. These are related both to basic processes of perception and cognition (learning and memory) and to more complex collective outcomes such as collective problem-solving, collective vigilance, the ‘wisdom of the crowd’, and the cultural accumulation of collective knowledge. These insights have important implications for our understanding not only of the psychological machinery that underlies animals’ ability to cope with specific problems posed by their environment, but also of their capacity to adapt when these environments undergo rapid change.
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25 сен 2024
