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Collective cognition in ant societies
Abstract: Social insects are paradigms of decentralized organization. Complex colony traits emerge from the interactions of many leaderless workers, each applying appropriate decision rules to limited local information. In this talk, I will describe efforts to understand this process through a combination of experimentation and computational analysis. This work uses nest site choice by colonies of rock ants act as a model system for collective intelligence. Sharing the burden of information processing contributes to enhanced colony performance, or “wisdom of crowds”, but I will show that it can sometimes instead lead to paradoxically worse performance. I will also describe how information theory can shed new light on the distinctive communication behavior that allows colony members to share information about nest sites and other important resources.