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CORR
2011
Springer

Collective Animal Behavior from Bayesian Estimation and Probability Matching

12 years 7 months ago
Collective Animal Behavior from Bayesian Estimation and Probability Matching
Animals living in groups make movement decisions that depend, among other factors, on social interactions with other group members. Our present understanding of social rules in animal collectives is based on empirical fits to observations and we lack firstprinciples approaches that allow their derivation. Here we show that patterns of collective decisions can be derived from the basic ability of animals to make probabilistic estimations in the presence of uncertainty. We build a decision-making model with two stages: Bayesian estimation and probabilistic matching. In the first stage, each animal makes a Bayesian estimation of which behavior is best to perform taking into account personal information about the environment and social information collected by observing the behaviors of other animals. In the probability matching stage, each animal chooses a behavior with a probability given by the Bayesian estimation that this behavior is the most appropriate one. This model derives ve...
Alfonso Pérez-Escudero, Gonzalo G. de Polav
Added 19 Aug 2011
Updated 19 Aug 2011
Type Journal
Year 2011
Where CORR
Authors Alfonso Pérez-Escudero, Gonzalo G. de Polavieja
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