Fast and Flexible Group Decision-Making

A Department of Computational Biology  Seminar

Featuring Naomi Ehrich Leonard, Professor, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University

A wide range of animals live and move in groups. Many animals do better in groups than alone when, for example, foraging for food, migrating, and avoiding predators. A key to group success is social interaction. Less well understood is how a group, with no centralized control, is capable of the fast and flexible decision-making required to carry out its tasks in an environment with uncertainty, variability, and dynamic change.

I will present a model of group decision-making dynamics that reveals the fundamental importance of nonlinearity, feedback, and social interaction structure. The model provides new insights into fast and flexible decision-making: how indecision can be broken as fast as it becomes costly, and how sensitivity to stimulus can be tuned as context and environment change.

Faculty Host: Dr. Andrew Hein