collective animal behavior from bayesian estimation and probability matching集体从贝叶斯估计和动物行为概率匹配.pdfVIP

Collective Animal Behavior from Bayesian Estimation and Probability Matching ´ 1,2 1,2 Alfonso Perez-Escudero *, Gonzalo G. de Polavieja * ´ ´ ´ 1 Instituto Cajal, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientıficas, Madrid, Spain, 2 Department of Theoretical Physics and Instituto ‘‘Nicolas Cabrera’’ de Fısica de ´ Materiales, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain Abstract 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 mainly based on empirical fits to observations, with less emphasis in obtaining first-principles 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 equal to the Bayesian- estimated probability that this behavior is the most appropriate one. This model derives very simple rules of interaction in animal collectiv