Collective Decision Making: From Neurons to Societies - SOS

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Self Organized Science

For the afternoon sessions we will allow everyone to self organize around key topics related to the theme of collective decision making. Anyone who wants to is welcome to identify an issue or opportunity related to the theme that they care about exploring with others. Along with announcing and posting the idea to the group, the person must take responsibility for convening the group and insuring that the group's discussions get reported on the wiki. Please note that everyone should feel free to vote with their feet: if you are not learning or contributing to the group that you are in, feel free to go to another group at any time. (The idea of using self organization for setting agendas was inspired by work in complex systems and has been encapsulated by the somewhat confusing term "Open Space Technology.")

Report from Turing Test for Superorganisms

• DeFroment, J. Miller, Morewedge, and Oppenheimer

• We began by debating whether or not one can design a Turing test for a group or superorganism. After some debate, we realized that it might be better to try to design tests of intelligence along a gradient rather than use humans as a benchmark. This would allow one to test a few different interesting questions:

1. Is this group as "smart" as a human?

2. Is group A "smarter" than group B?

3. Is this group "smarter" than an individual member of the group? Does it learn more quickly, demonstrate less noise, etc.?

4. Can the group compare alternatives along more than one dimension (e.g., amount of reward/probability of reward)?

5. How robust is the superorganism? That is, can it survive in novel environments.

6. Can the group deceive another group?

7. Does the group exhibit strategic behavior? How many levels of reasoning can the colony go to?

8. If the majority of the group holds a false belief (e.g., is deceived by an experimenter), can a minority of group members correct this false belief?

9. Can the group engage in generalization of learning?

• We also explored the idea of testing whether a superorganism can learn in the same way that an individual organism does.

1. Are there analogs of learning experiments on, say, conditioning pigeons, that can be applied to ant colonies? For example, can you condition an ant colony to novel stimuli (such as a novel chemical signals) to behave in different ways?

2. Are there analogies between types of ant tasks and different kinds of physiological systems (patrollers as sense organs, foragers as hands, ??? as short term and long term memory)? Is there transactive memory in a colony (is it organized among individual members)?

3. Is there a collective reward structure? In other words, if one member is rewarded for another member's behavior, does the non-rewarded member continue to perform that behavior?

4. Does the colony use some kind of physical memory--do interior properties of a colony reflect the outside food sources (e.g., location of midden piles)?

5. Is there cultural learning? If you remove the members of the group that learned a specific behavior (e.g., association between a reward and a novel pheromone), does the group still retain the association when you remove the specific members who perceived the reward and stimulus first-hand?

Report from Reliability of Collective Decision Making

• Zollman,

Report from Rule Sets in Human Collective Decision Making

• Seeley,

Report from Group Size and Collective Decision Making

• Gordon,