Naïve individuals promote collective exploration in homing pigeons

Abstract

Group-living animals that rely on stable foraging or migratory routes can develop behavioural traditions to pass route information down to inexperienced individuals. Striking a balance between exploitation of social information and exploration for better alternatives is essential to prevent the spread of maladaptive traditions. We investigated this balance during cumulative route development in the homing pigeon Columba livia. We quantified information transfer within pairs of birds in a transmission-chain experiment and determined how birds with different levels of experience contributed to the exploration–exploitation trade-off. Newly introduced naïve individuals were initially more likely to initiate exploration than experienced birds, but the pair soon settled into a pattern of alternating leadership with both birds contributing equally. Experimental pairs showed an oscillating pattern of exploration over generations that might facilitate the discovery of more efficient routes. Our results introduce a new perspective on the roles of leadership and information pooling in the context of collective learning.

Mechanisms of collective learning: how can animal groups improve collective performance when repeating a task?

“…[ 13 , 34 , 42 ]), but this would imply a change in group composition, which we will discuss in more detail later (§4b). However, social learning processes might also occur in a group of initially all-naïve individuals, if some members learn faster or fortuitously make better contributions that are recognized as more efficient and then (socially) learnt by other members (a form of ‘information pooling’ [ 26 , 42 , 43 ]). Indeed, the mechanism could even encompass simple social facilitation: the mere presence of conspecifics may lower individuals' neophobia and time devoted to vigilance [ 25 ], and in turn increase their attention to the relevant elements of the task.…”

“…Indeed, the mechanism could even encompass simple social facilitation: the mere presence of conspecifics may lower individuals' neophobia and time devoted to vigilance [25], and in turn increase their attention to the relevant elements of the task. In homing pigeon flocks for instance, some of these social learning processes seem involved in collective learning of navigational routes [13,43]. A second simple emergent property may arise if the contribution of individual members to collective decisionmaking is modulated by those members' knowledge of the task at hand.…”

“…For instance, if the more knowledgeable members tend to act as leaders, the group's performance could increase faster than the average performance of its members. In homing pigeons again, links between knowledge and leadership have sometimes been observed, although not under all conditions [43][44][45][46]. More generally, there is a rich literature on the links between leadership and individual knowledge in different animal groups (e.g.…”

A controlled transfer entropy approach to detect asymmetric interactions in heterogeneous systems

“…By expanding on the classical concept of mutual information (Shannon 1948) that quantifies the shared information between two random variables, Schreiber (2000) introduced transfer entropy as a measure of the asymmetry in interaction between two coupled stochastic processes. Since its inception, transfer entropy has emerged as the prevalent choice for studying pairwise or dyadic interactions in a wide-range of complex systems, for example in quantifying the directional connectivity and inferring network topology in brain functioning (Staniek and Lehnertz 2008, Vicente et al 2011, Stetter et al 2012, identifying leadership behavior in groups and pairwise interactions between animals (Butail et al 2016, Lord et al 2016, Neri et al 2017, Shaffer and Abaid 2020, Valentini et al 2021, studying complex connections in climate science (Hlinka et al 2013, Campuzano et al 2018, inferring causality in stocks and finance (Sandoval Jr 2014, He andShang 2017), and understanding causal influences in social media and human behavior (Borge-Holthoefer et al 2016, Porfiri et al 2019.…”

Inferring directional interactions in collective dynamics: a critique to intrinsic mutual information

“…Without the need of a mathematical model to be identified or experimental manipulations to be conducted, information theory allows for deciphering the strength and direction of interactions between coupled units from mere experimental observations of their dynamics. For example, through the lens of information theory, researchers have clarified the differences between anatomical and functional networks in the brain [2,3], quantified the role of media and policy on human decision-making [4,5], identified physical pathways underlying climate change across the globe [6,7], and detected leaders in groups of animals [8][9][10].…”