On the Role of Collective Sensing and Evolution in Group Formation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how collective sensing influences group formation in populations, showing that resource scarcity promotes gregarious behavior and that solitary agents can evolve social strategies in response to environmental changes.

Contribution

It demonstrates that resource scarcity drives the evolution of gregarious behavior and introduces a neural network-based model for emergent group formation without predefined behaviors.

Findings

Gregarious behavior is not always the fittest strategy in abundant resources.

Resource scarcity promotes the evolution of gregarious behavior.

Solitary agents can evolve gregarious strategies when resources become scarce.

Abstract

Collective sensing is an emergent phenomenon which enables individuals to estimate a hidden property of the environment through the observation of social interactions. Previous work on collective sensing shows that gregarious individuals obtain an evolutionary advantage by exploiting collective sensing when competing against solitary individuals. This work addresses the question of whether collective sensing allows for the emergence of groups from a population of individuals without predetermined behaviors. It is assumed that group membership does not lessen competition on the limited resources in the environment, e.g. groups do not improve foraging efficiency. Experiments are run in an agent-based evolutionary model of a foraging task, where the fitness of the agents depends on their foraging strategy. The foraging strategy of agents is determined by a neural network, which does not require explicit modeling of the environment and of the interactions between agents. Experiments demonstrate that gregarious behavior is not the evolutionary-fittest strategy if resources are abundant, thus invalidating previous findings in a specific region of the parameter space. In other words, resource scarcity makes gregarious behavior so valuable as to make up for the increased competition over the few available resources. Furthermore, it is shown that a population of solitary agents can evolve gregarious behavior in response to a sudden scarcity of resources, thus individuating a possible mechanism that leads to gregarious behavior in nature. The evolutionary process operates on the whole parameter space of the neural networks, hence these behaviors are selected among an unconstrained set of behavioral models.