Information transfer in a swarm of soldier crabs

Tomaru, Takenori; Murakami, Hisashi; Niizato, Takayuki; Nishiyama, Yuta; Sonoda, Kohei; Moriyama, Tohru; Gunji, Yukio Pegio

doi:10.1007/s10015-016-0272-y

Cited by 26 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 16 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Unlike the study of Wang et al [77], the above studies quantified average dependencies over time rather than local dependencies at specific time points; for example, leadership relationships in general rather than their (local) dynamics over time. Local versions of transfer entropy and active information storage have been used to measure pairwise correlations in a "swarm" of soldier crabs, finding that decision-making is affected by the group size [74]. Statistical significance was not reported, presumably due to a small sample size.…”

Section: Information-theoretic Measures For Collective Motionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Informative and misinformative interactions in a school of fish

et al. 2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

It is generally accepted that, when moving in groups, animals process information to coordinate their motion. Recent studies have begun to apply rigorous methods based on Information Theory to quantify such distributed computation. Following this perspective, we use transfer entropy to quantify dynamic information flows locally in space and time across a school of fish during directional changes around a circular tank, i.e. U-turns. This analysis reveals peaks in information flows during collective U-turns and identifies two different flows: an informative flow (positive transfer entropy) based on fish that have already turned about fish that are turning, and a misinformative flow (negative transfer entropy) based on fish that have not turned yet about fish that are turning. We also reveal that the information flows are related to relative position and alignment between fish, and identify spatial patterns of information and misinformation cascades. This study offers several methodological contributions and we expect further application of these methodologies to reveal intricacies of self-organisation in other animal groups and active matter in general. * emanuele.crosato@sydney.edu.au arXiv:1705.01213v1 [q-bio.QM] 3 May 2017 Nagy et al. [55] used a variety of correlation functions to measure directional dependencies between the velocities of pairs of pigeons flying in flocks of up to ten individuals, reconstructing the leadership network of the flock. As has been shown later, this network does not correspond to the hierarchy between birds [56]. Information transfer has been extensively studied in flocks of starlings, by observing the propagation of direction changes across the flocks [20,19,2]. More recently, Rosenthal et al. [69] attempted to determine a communication structure of a school of fish during its collective evasion manoeuvres manifested through cascades of behavioural change. A functional mapping between sensory inputs and motor responses was inferred by tracking fish position and body posture, and calculating visual fields.Rather than consider semantic or pragmatic information, many contemporary studies employ rigorous information theoretic measures that quantify information as uncertainty reduction, following Shannon [24], in order to deal with the stochastic, continuous and noisy nature of intrinsic information processing in natural systems [28]. Distributed information processing is typically dissected into three primitive functions: the transmission, storage and modification of information [38]. Information dynamics is a recent framework characterising and measuring each of the primitives information-theoretically [49,41]. In viewing the state update dynamics of a random process as an information processing event, this framework performs an information regression in accounting for where the information to predict that state update can be found by an observer, first identifying predictive information from the past of the process as information storage, then predictive information from other sour...

show abstract

Section: Information-theoretic Measures For Collective Motionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Informative and misinformative interactions in a school of fish

et al. 2018

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Many researchers, therefore, have considered information transfer (or causal relationships) among individuals in small groups [37,38,39]. The (local) transfer entropy is the preferred measure to use in this case [40,41,42,43,44,45]. For example, Crosato et al [39] showed that the transfer of misinformation happens in five-fish school when the whole school changes direction.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Finding continuity and discontinuity in fish schools via integrated information theory

et al. 2020

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Collective behaviour is known to be the result of diverse dynamics and is sometimes likened to a living system. Although many studies have revealed the dynamics of various collective behaviours, their main focus was on the information process inside the collective, not on the whole system itself. For example, the qualitative difference between two elements and three elements as a system has rarely been investigated. Tononi et al. have proposed Integrated Information Theory (IIT) to measure the degree of consciousness Φ. IIT postulates that the amount of information loss caused by certain partitions is equivalent to the degree of information integration in the system. This measure is not only useful for estimating the degree of consciousness but can also be applied to more general network systems. Here we applied IIT (in particular, IIT 3.0 using PyPhi) to analyse real fish schools (Plecoglossus altivelis). Our hypothesis in this study is a very simple one: a living system evolves to raise its Φ value. If we accept this hypothesis, IIT reveals the existence of continuous and discontinuous properties as group size varies. For example, leadership in the fish school emerged for a school size of four or above; but not below three. Furthermore, this transition was not observed by measuring mutual information or in a simple Boids model. This result suggests that integrated information Φ can reveal some inherent properties which cannot be observed using other measures. We also discuss how the fish recognition of the figure-ground relation, that is, what determines the relevant ON and OFF states, may reveal various optimal paths for obtaining the functional evolution of collective behaviour.

show abstract

“…The selection of a fully connected network without a self-loop is based on our previous result because the MIP cut fits the group leader. Note the difference in leadership compared with preceding studies [42][43][44]49]. The derivation of the leadership is not based on the external group behaviour but on the internal causal structure.…”

Section: Short Time Scalementioning

confidence: 97%

“…However, for smaller system sizes, heterogeneous interactions [36,37] result in different global motion patterns in N = 2 and N = 3 [38,39]. Hence, some studies thoroughly investigated information transfer (or causal relationships) among individuals in small groups [40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Classification of Collective Animal Behaviour as an Autonomous System

Niizato¹,

Sakamoto²,

Mototake³

et al. 2020

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Integrated information theory (IIT) was initially proposed to describe human consciousness in terms of intrinsic-causal brain network structures. This theory could potentially be used for conceptualising complex living systems. In a previous study, we analysed collective behaviour in {\it Plecoglossus altivelis}. We found that IIT 3.0 exhibits qualitative discontinuity between three and four schools of fish in terms of $\Phi$ values (i.e., group integrity). Other measures, such as mutual information, did not show such characteristics. In this study, we follow up on our previous findings and introduce two new factors. First, we define the global parameter settings to determine a different kind of group integrity. Second, we set several timescales (from $\Delta t =5/120$ s to $\Delta t =120/120$ s). The results showed that we succeeded in classifying fish school according to their group size in terms of the degree of group integrity, despite the small group size. The concrete classification includes the followership for a two-fish school, fission--fusion for a three-fish school, emergence of leadership for a four-fish school, and emergence of Boid-like behaviour for a five-fish school. These minute classifications have never been revealed before. Finally, we discuss one of the longstanding paradoxes in collective behaviour, known as the heap paradox, for which two tentative answers could be provided through our IIT analysis.

show abstract

Information transfer in a swarm of soldier crabs

Cited by 26 publications

References 16 publications

Informative and misinformative interactions in a school of fish

Informative and misinformative interactions in a school of fish

Finding continuity and discontinuity in fish schools via integrated information theory

New Classification of Collective Animal Behaviour as an Autonomous System

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About