Public evening lecture by Professor Jens Krause, PhD (Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in the Berlin Research Association)

Studies on collective cognition provide numerous examples of how the efficient dissemination of information within groups leads to benefits as group size increases. However, little is known about whether groups also amplify maladaptive information, such as false alarms, and whether such costs reduce potential benefits. In this study, we investigated wild schools of fish that respond collectively with flight-dive movements when attacked by birds. We analysed the collective response to bird attacks as well as to similar but harmless flyovers as a function of school size. Larger flocks recognised predator attacks increasingly better, while their response to harmless overflights remained constant. In addition, the decision time decreased with increasing swarm size. Larger swarms were thus able to simultaneously overcome two central trade-offs that are typical for individual decisions: the conflict between correct and false alarms and the conflict between speed and accuracy.
I will put these results in the context of examples of human collective cognition in similar problems and try to derive a general definition of collective cognition. At the end of my talk, I will explain how our work on collective cognition is part of a broader research programme on the "Science of Intelligence" that is being developed in our Cluster of Excellence of the same name in Berlin (https://www.scienceofintelligence.de/).

Moderation: Denise Becker and Jule Meyer B.Sc.