Title of dissertation: SOCIAL AND ECOLOGICAL FACTORS INFLUENCING COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR IN GIANT DANIO Amanda Megan Chicoli, Doctor of Philosophy, 2016 Dissertation directed by: Professor Derek Paley Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program A fundamental problem in biology is understanding how and why things group together. Collective behavior is observed on all organismic levels — from cells an...

Abstract Collective dynamics is ubiquitous in various physical, biological, and social systems, where simple local interactions between individual units lead to complex global patterns. A common feature of diverse collective behaviors that the exhibit either convergent or divergent evolution their behaviors, i.e. becoming increasingly similar distinct, respectively. The associated changes acros...

This paper evaluates the Collective Neuro-Evolution (CONE) method, comparative to a related controller design method, in a simulated multi-robot system. CONE solves collective behavior tasks, and increases task performance via facilitating behavioral specialization. Emergent specialization is guided by genotype and behavioral specialization di erence metrics that regulate genotype recombination...

Research efforts have long been directed at understanding variations in collaborative behaviors among work teams with burgeoning interest in teams operating in knowledge-intensive settings. One of the largely unexplained issues is how does team image and collective identification facilitate collaborative behaviors. Here, survey data were collected from nineteen highly technical work teams engag...

In studies of genetic algorithms, evolutionary computing, and ant colony mechanisms, it is recognized that the higher-order forms of collective intelligence play an important role in metaheuristic computing and computational intelligence. Collective intelligence is an integration of collective behaviors of individuals in social groups or collective functions of components in computational intel...

Designing and controlling simple collective robot behaviors often requires complex range and bearing sensors and peerto-peer communication strategies. Recent work studying swarms robots that have no computational power has shown that complex behaviors such as aggregation and clustering items can be produced from extremely simple control policies and sensing capability. We extend previous work o...

We derive a class of macroscopic differential equations that describe collective adaptation, starting from a discrete-time stochastic microscopic model. The behavior of each agent is a dynamic balance between adaptation that locally achieves the best action and memory loss that leads to randomized behavior. We show that, although individual agents interact with their environment and other agent...

In order for rational choice theory (RCT) to explain the production of collective action, it must be able to distinguish between two behaviorally identical possibilities: one, that all of the agents in a group are each performing behaviors in pursuit of a set of individual actions; and two, that all of those agents are performing those behaviors in pursuit of a collective action. I argue that t...