AsianScientist (Oct. 12, 2017) – In a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, scientists in Singapore have discovered that there is an optimal amount of social interaction among individuals, beyond which coordinated action becomes inefficient.
From schools of fish to swarms of insects, many animals live and move in groups. They have no leader, no central coordinator, and yet manage to perform awe-inspiring coordinated displays of collective motion.
These swarming behaviors are archetypal examples of how local coordination between nearby animals translates into an emerging global behavior. But how localized should this local coordination be? Is more interaction always better? Not all animals swarm, and observations of flocks of starlings show that they limit their interaction to their six-to-seven nearest neighbors.
In this study, scientists at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) simulated coordinated group actions using classical models of behavioral spread through complex networks. If one thinks of the predator’s presence as a ‘signal’ that propagates through a network, it is expected that the earlier an individual receives this signal, the better its chances are of avoiding the predator.
The simulations showed that the propagation speed of a signal is radically increased when the average number of connections per individual is restricted, leading to a higher chance of survival for the group. For all the benefits that coordination and collective behavior yields to the members of a group, it seems that when it comes to social interaction, there can be too much of a good thing.
This work reveals the clear parallel between collective evasive maneuvers and the spread of information in social networks. The insights gathered from the behavior of swarming animals can be applied to many problems in engineering and social sciences, from increasing the flexibility of the power grid and designing responsive swarms of robots to improving crowd mobility and optimizing information spreading on social networks.
“For a long time, it was assumed that the performance of a group improves by making it more connected,” said Principal investigator, SUTD Assistant Professor Roland Bouffanais. “This research shows the unexpected detrimental effects of having too many connections for both living and artificial systems.”
The article can be found at: Mateo et al. (2017) Effect of Correlations in Swarms on Collective Response.
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Source: Singapore University of Technology and Design; Photo: Jared Belson/Pexels.
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