This paper describes the current status of my doctoral research. In my work I am developing a novel approach to studying division of workload in collaborative tasks, with a particular focus on exploring division of labour in collaborative information seeking. My approach is based on the application of an economic game to the problem of workload division. Using this game as a theoretical and emp...

In social insect colonies, many tasks are performed by higherorder entities, such as groups and teams whose task solving capacities transcend those of the individual participants. In this paper, we investigate the emergence of such higher-order entities using a colony of up to 12 physical robots. We report on an experimental study in which the robots engage in a range of different activities, i...

We argue that the reading of words and text is fundamentally conditioned by the splitting of the fovea and the hemispheric division of the brain, and, furthermore, that the equitable division of labour between the hemispheres is a characteristic of normal visual word recognition. We report analyses of a representative corpus of the eye fixations of normal readers in the realistic reading of tex...

Unicellular organisms require more energy and materials for their survival than multicellular organisms. A unicellular organism is exposed to environments all around and thus has to protect itself against the effects of the environment on all sides. However, in multicellular organisms all the cells are not in direct contact with the environment and specific cells take up the protective function...

Cooperation is vital for maintaining the integrity of complex life forms. In many cases in nature cooperation manifests itself through constituent parts performing different, but complementary, functions. The vast majority of studies on the evolution of cooperation, however, look only at the special case in which cooperation manifests itself via the constituent parts performing identical tasks....