Revealing the structure of information flows discriminates similar animal social behaviors.

Gabriele Valentini,Nobuaki Mizumoto,Stephen C Pratt,Sara I Walker,Theodore P Pavlic

doi:10.7554/elife.55395

Abstract

Behavioral correlations stretching over time are an essential but often neglected aspect of interactions among animals. These correlations pose a challenge to current behavioral-analysis methods that lack effective means to analyze complex series of interactions. Here we show that non-invasive information-theoretic tools can be used to reveal communication protocols that guide complex social interactions by measuring simultaneous flows of different types of information between subjects. We demonstrate this approach by showing that the tandem-running behavior of the ant Temnothorax rugatulus and that of the termites Coptotermes formosanus and Reticulitermes speratus are governed by different communication protocols. Our discovery reconciles the diverse ultimate causes of tandem running across these two taxa with their apparently similar signaling mechanisms. We show that bidirectional flow of information is present only in ants and is consistent with the use of acknowledgement signals to regulate the flow of directional information.

Highlights

Social interactions among individuals unfold across different scales of space and time (Flack 2012)
Previous studies have used symbolic transfer entropy (Staniek and Lehnertz 2008) to reveal whether one animal is influencing another on the basis of a single symbolic representation of behavioral data (Orange and Abaid 2015; Butail, Mwaffo, and Porfiri 2016; Kim et al 2018; Ward et al 2018; Porfiri et al 2019; Ray et al 2019). We extend these methods by applying transfer entropy to different symbolic representations of the same data to capture parallel information flows within the same behavior
As we have shown in this study, information theory offers tools such as transfer entropy that can disentangle the temporal structure of the interaction between individuals

Summary

Introduction

Social interactions among individuals unfold across different scales of space and time (Flack 2012). Causal relationships can often be captured by experiments that manipulate an immediate stimulus to reveal its causal connection(s) to a stereotyped response, or fixed action pattern. The copyright holder for this preprint It is made available under applied over time contingent upon the outcome of previous interactions. In these cases, where short-term histories may affect longer-term outcomes, the ability to make testable predictions requires quantitative tools that can capture the dynamics of the interaction protocol at an intermediate time scale. Considering only short-term interactions, like the stimulus-and-response of herring-gull parent and chick, might not explain functional differences observed at long time scales in otherwise similar behaviors

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