# Flocking in complex environments -- attention trade-offs in collective information processing

## TL;DR

This paper models collective behavior in complex environments, revealing that limiting individual cognitive capacity can enhance large-scale coordination by reducing distraction, highlighting a fundamental trade-off between coordination and responsiveness.

## Contribution

It introduces a model showing how attentional bottlenecks can improve collective coordination in complex environments, providing new insights into biological and artificial swarm design.

## Key findings

- Large-scale coordination is maximized by limiting individual cognitive capacity.
- A trade-off exists between collective coordination and environmental responsiveness.
- Self-organized dynamics enable the collective to isolate from distracting cues.

## Abstract

The ability of biological and artificial collectives to outperform solitary individuals in a wide variety of tasks depends crucially on the efficient processing of social and environmental information at the level of the collective. Here, we model collective behavior in complex environments with many potentially distracting cues. Counter-intuitively, large-scale coordination in such environments can be maximized by strongly limiting the cognitive capacity of individuals, where due to self-organized dynamics the collective self-isolates from disrupting information. We observe a fundamental trade-off between coordination and collective responsiveness to environmental cues. Our results offer important insights into possible evolutionary trade-offs in collective behavior in biology and suggests novel principles for design of artificial swarms exploiting attentional bottlenecks.