Does diversity deliver? How variation in individual knowledge and behavioural traits impact on the performance of animal groups

多样性能带来好处吗？

• 批准号: NE/H016600/2
• 负责人: Andrew King
• 金额: $ 35.23万
• 依托单位: Royal Veterinary College
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Fellowship
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2011 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=NE%2FH016600%2F2
• 关键词: Does; diversity; deliver; How; variation; Does; diversity; deliver; How; variation

Have you ever been stood with a group of friends (or worse, colleagues) in an unfamiliar city trying to choose which restaurant to dine at? I expect so, but do you remember how you made your choice, all the while trying to stick together and not lose one another? There are a number of ways you could have arrived at your decision. You may have followed the decision of the group member who set-off purposefully down the High Street, or you all may have agreed to go to the restaurant declared 'the best in town' by the person with local knowledge of the city. Such situations are just as common in the animal world. Swap 'restaurant' to 'foraging patch' and we have a description for the type of foraging decisions faced by almost all social animals, every day of their lives. But these are not trivial decisions; a number of consecutive bad choices-where a group are led to poor foraging areas, or risky habitats-can be fatal. Such decisions are made even more difficult where animals face unexpected dangers or an environment which is constantly changing, something all animals are increasingly encountering in our rapidly changing world. One way animal groups may cope with uncertainty-and perform well in such environments-is by drawing upon one another's particular expertise or information, or having individuals bold enough to try out new options. For instance, we know that summing information possessed by individual group-members can increase the collective cognition of groups, a concept which has attracted much attention in the media and been termed 'the wisdom of crowds'. Larger and/or more diverse groups may also contain individuals with different skills and experiences, which increase the chances of a group solving a given task. But to date, studies that explicitly investigate the effect of such diversity on group performance have so far been restricted to human teams acting for financial gain, and have produced mixed results. In the proposed fellowship, I will use a combination of experimental and theoretical data to test the hypothesis that 'diversity delivers' in a group setting, and ask: What makes a winning team? To answer this question, I will present highly gregarious freshwater fish, the nine-spined stickleback, with a series of problems not unlike the 'which restaurant?' example I used in my opening sentences. Combining highly sophisticated video tracking of individual fishes movements, with foraging devices made using kitchen egg-timers and laboratory petri dishes, I will explore the role of variability in individual knowledge and personality. Questions I will tackle will include: If the most informed individual in a group is also the boldest in the group, does the group make more accurate decisions as a consequence of following this bold individual's choices? If a group is composed of a majority of poorly informed bold individuals and a minority of well-informed shy individuals, is the group able to utilise the information possessed by the latter? How different does a groups information or personality composition have to be before they cannot agree on a place to forage, and split up? The unique experimental set-up proposed will also allow me to measure the actual benefit to individual fish (in terms of amount of food eaten) in these different contexts. All of these experiments will take place with groups of just five fish, given the time needed to individually assess individual personality and train fish to different levels of 'expertise'. However, I will then use a series of computer simulations based on what I find in these experiments to make predictions about the outcome where shoals of fifty or a hundred individuals are concerned, which I will then test in the laboratory. Overall, this project will be the first attempt to manipulate the distribution of both information and personality within groups, and will provide a new insight into the function of diversity for social animals when coping with uncertainty.

您是否曾经在一个陌生的城市与一群朋友（或更糟糕的是同事）站在一起，试图选择哪家餐厅用餐？我期待的是，但是您是否还记得自己如何做出选择，而试图坚持在一起而不是彼此失去？您可以通过多种方式做出决定。您可能已经遵循有目的地沿着高街有意设置的小组成员的决定，或者大家可能同意去餐厅，被当地知识的人宣布为“镇上最好的”。这种情况在动物界同样普遍。将“餐厅”交换为“觅食补丁”，我们对几乎所有社交动物（每天的生活）面临的觅食类型有描述。但这不是微不足道的决定。许多连续的不良选择 - 一组导致觅食区域差或危险的栖息地 - 致命。当动物面临意外危险或不断变化的环境时，这种决定变得更加困难，在我们迅速变化的世界中，所有动物都越来越多地遇到。动物群体可以通过借鉴彼此的特殊专业知识或信息来应对不确定性并在这种环境中表现良好的一种方式，或者让个人大胆尝试新选择。例如，我们知道，总结个别成员所拥有的信息可以增加对群体的集体认知，这个概念吸引了媒体上的很多关注，并被称为“人群的智慧”。较大和/或更多不同的群体也可能包含具有不同技能和经验的人，这增加了解决给定任务的小组的机会。但是迄今为止，迄今为止，明确研究这种多样性对群体绩效影响的研究仅限于为经济利益而行事的人类团队，并产生了不同的结果。在拟议的奖学金中，我将使用实验数据和理论数据的组合来检验“多样性在小组环境中提供”的假设，并询问：是什么使获胜的团队？为了回答这个问题，我将提出高度群体的淡水鱼，这是九个刺的棍子，还有一系列问题与“哪个餐厅？”不同。我在开放句子中使用了示例。将高度精致的视频跟踪对单个鱼类运动进行结合，以及使用厨房鸡蛋和实验室培养皿制成的觅食设备，我将探索可变性在个人知识和个性中的作用。我将要解决的问题将包括：如果小组中最有知识的人也是小组中最大胆的人，那么由于遵循这种大胆的人的选择，该小组是否会做出更准确的决定？如果一个小组由大多数知情的大胆个人和少数信息良好的害羞的人组成，那么该团体是否能够利用后者拥有的信息？小组的信息或个性组成必须有何不同，才能在他们无法就觅食地点达成共识和分裂之地达成共识之前有何不同？提出的独特的实验设置还可以使我能够在这些不同的情况下衡量单个鱼类的实际收益（就食物的数量而言）。鉴于需要分别评估个性人物并将鱼类培训到不同水平的“专业知识”所需的时间。但是，然后，我将根据我在这些实验中发现的一系列计算机模拟来对五十或一百个人的浅滩进行预测，并在实验室中进行测试。总体而言，该项目将是操纵组中信息和个性分布的首次尝试，并将在应对不确定性时对社交动物的多样性功能提供新的见解。