Abstract
Social animals have the remarkable ability to organize into collectives to achieve goals unobtainable to individual members. Equally striking is the observation that despite differences in perceptual-motor capabilities, different animals often exhibit qualitatively similar collective states of organization and coordination. Such qualitative similarities can be seen in corralling behaviors involving the encirclement of prey that are observed, for example, during collaborative hunting amongst several apex predator species living in disparate environments. Similar encirclement behaviors are also displayed by human participants in a collaborative problem-solving task involving the herding and containment of evasive artificial agents. Inspired by the functional similarities in this behavior across humans and non-human systems, this paper investigated whether the containment strategies displayed by humans emerge as a function of the task's underlying dynamics, which shape patterns of goal-directed corralling more generally. This hypothesis was tested by comparing the strategies naïve human dyads adopt during the containment of a set of evasive artificial agents across two disparate task contexts. Despite the different movement types (manual manipulation or locomotion) required in the different task contexts, the behaviors that humans display can be predicted as emergent properties of the same underlying task-dynamic model.
Highlights
Social animals have the extraordinary capacity to structure their activity in coordination with other members of a larger group
Inspired by the similitude in the containment and encirclement strategies observed during human [11, 12, 17], as well as animal [7,8,9,10] and non-biological systems [13], the current study evaluated whether coupled oscillatory containment (COC) and circling behaviors can be understood more generally as invariant, emergent properties of human dyadic corralling behaviors
Novice participants, when tasked to corral seven evasive target agents (TAs) in a task environment which required locomotion, developed a coordinated circling strategy which kept the agents sufficiently contained. This circling behavior was distinct from the oscillatory (i.e., COC) behavior observed by dyads in previous research where participants completed the task using hand movements [11, 17]
Summary
Social animals have the extraordinary capacity to structure their activity in coordination with other members of a larger group. The resultant behaviors that emerge at the collective level display key features of self-organizing systems [1], whereby interactions among individuals give rise to functionally organized, coordinated behavioral patterns. These patterns show a remarkable degree of qualitative similarity across species [2,3,4,5,6]. Standing on opposite sides of the display, participants controlled herding agents (HAs) which would repel nearby TAs. The goal was to keep the TAs from fleeing the game field by containing them within a red circular region during one-minute trials (see [11] for more details, as well as recent implementations [12, 17]). The TAs exhibited Brownian motion which required active movements by participants to keep them contained within the red region (else they would disperse)
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