Collective Behavior

Dear Colleagues,

Collective behaviors in animal and human groups have attracted a considerable amount of attention over the last twenty years. This interest is first motivated by the need for understanding interactions between individuals and the high-level properties that emerge from these interactions. Another reason for this interest is the appearance of new techniques (GPS, RFID and sociometers) that now provide high-precision datasets for the fine-scale analysis of individuals’ interactions and behaviors. In many group-living species and also in human groups, individuals coordinate their actions and achieve collective tasks that are far beyond single individuals' capabilities. These performances arise through self-organized processes that are based on the action of each individual on its environment and on the direct or indirect interactions that occur between individuals. Although much progress has been made on the understanding of the mechanisms underlying collective behavior, we are still far from fully grasping how these mechanisms allow animal and human groups to adapt to changing environments, or to collectively solve complex problems. Therefore, it is of crucial importance to identify which information triggers the behavioral actions of individuals within a group. How much of the information each individual is using is available to the whole group (public information) and to specific individuals (private information)? What kind of information promotes the effective action of the group? And how this information propagates within a group? Uncovering the principles that govern collective behaviors in animal and human groups is a crucial step for understanding their evolution.

In this special issue we are looking for contributions that have collective behaviors in animal and human groups as their main focus, through experimental (both laboratory and field) or modeling approaches, or combining theory with experiments. Proposals are invited from behavioral and social scientists, cognitive scientists, economists, computational biologists, statistical physicists, multi-agent modelers, and indeed researchers from any discipline that has social complexity and collective intelligence as a core topic.

Dr. Guy Theraulaz
Guest Editor

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• collective behavior
• collective intelligence
• behavioral analysis
• self-organization
• computational modeling