Individuals' Mobility May Promote Criticality in Animal Collective Decision-making

TL;DR

This paper models how individual mobility influences phase transitions in animal collective decision-making, revealing that mobility can induce consensus at critical points even with local interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a model demonstrating that individual mobility can lead to critical consensus in animal groups, contrasting with stationary populations.

Findings

Mobility induces critical consensus in local interaction scenarios.

Mutual information reveals critical behavior dynamics.

Global interactions show similar critical phenomena.

Abstract

It is highly believed that the individuals' mobility plays an important role in phase transition in animal collective motion. Here, we propose a model to study the effects of individuals' mobility in a distributed animal collective decision-making process, during which each individual faces two options with equal quality. We implement the quorum response rule, a type of social interaction rule which is taxonomically recognized in animal collective decision-making, as the sole interaction rule. After the introduction of individuals' mobility, we find that the group can reach a consensus decision at one of the options at some critical points even the interaction is local. This result is an obvious contrast to the stationary individuals, the population of which is always equally distributed between the two options with fluctuations. In order to explore the information dynamics, we introduce an important information-theoretic measure, mutual information, to study the critical behaviors. Furthermore, we study the case when individuals interact globally, and also find some qualitative similar critical behaviors.