There is increasing evidence that animal groups can maintain coordinated behaviour and make collective decisions based on simple interaction rules. Effective collective action may be further facilitated by individual variation within groups, particularly through leader-follower polymorphisms. Recent studies have suggested that individual-level personality traits influence the degree to which in...

Collective behaviour is a characteristic feature in many-body systems, important for developments in fields such as magnetism, superconductivity, photonics and electronics. Recently, there has been increasing interest in the optically nonlinear response of collective excitations. Here we demonstrate how the nonlinear interaction of a many-body system with intense XUV radiation can be used as an...

Multiagent systems used in the AI community are typically knowledge based, consisting of heterogeneous unembodied agents carrying out explicitly assigned tasks, and communicating via symbols. In contrast, many extremely competent natural collective systems of multiple agents (e.g. social insects) are not knowledge based, and are predominantly homogeneous and embodied; agents have no explicit ta...

Synchronisation occurs when large numbers of individuals co-ordinate to act in unison. In this wide definition of the word, many different types of collective behaviour are examples of synchronisation. A highly aligned group of birds, fish or particles can be said to have synchronised their direction of movement. More commonly however, when we use the word synchronisation we are thinking about ...

The digital traces that people continuously leave behind – voluntarily or not – while using communication devices such as mobile phones or interacting with social media platforms reflect their behaviour in great detail. In this paper we show examples of the spatiotemporal patterns of collective human dynamics, which we derived from ‘social sensor’ data. We used user-generated data in mobile net...

Collective behaviours contributing to patterns of group formation and coordinated movement are common across many ecosystems and taxa. Their ubiquity is presumably due to altering interactions between individuals and their predators, resources and physical environment in ways that enhance individual fitness. On the other hand, fitness costs are also often associated with group formation. Modifi...

A wide range of measurements can be made on the collective motion of groups, and the movement of individuals within them. These include, but are not limited to: group size, polarization, speed, turning speed, speed or directional correlations, and distances to near neighbours. From an ecological and evolutionary perspective, we would like to know which of these measurements capture biologically...

CAPELLO R. (1999) Spatial transfer of knowledge in high technology milieux: learning versus collective learning processes, Reg. Studies 33, 353± 365. An analysis of the de® nitions provided so far in the literature shows ambiguities in the conceptualization of collective learning. A parallel analysis of the concepts of learning and collective learning is provided, and similarities and diVerence...

Many spatial patterns observed in nature emerge from local processes and their interactions with the local environment. The clustering of objects by social insects represents such a pattern formation process that can be observed at both the individual and the collective level. In this paper, we study the interaction between air currents and clustering behaviour in order to address the coordinat...

Stereotypy is the narrowing down of an animal’s behavioural repertoire. Starting from normal behaviour there is a continuum between rich and free behaviour on the one hand, and dull and Ž predictable stereotypies on the other. To study the continuum all that one needs are ‘‘knobs’’ like . drugs or stress that shift the behaviour from one end to the other, and a method for documenting the behavi...