“Ants and humans are highly social,” begins researcher Ofer Feinerman, from the Weizmann Institute of Sciences, and this social nature has clear advantages. One of them is cognition or collective intelligence, defined as the ability of species to solve problems in groups.
Thanks to this ability, ants and humans share the virtue of being able to transport loads collectively: we are practically the only ones who can do it and, among ants, only 1% of species are capable of it. However, Feinerman and his colleagues have shown, with an unusual experiment, that the way we collaborate and face group challenges is very different; and apparently, the ants have an advantage over us.
The experiment
Ants and humans had to transport a ‘T’-shaped object between 3 rooms
Feinerman and his team devised a maze based on the “moving the piano” model, which involves transporting a strange geometrically shaped load (in this case, a ‘T’) through a narrow, obstructed space, in this case three rooms. The experiment was carried out both with ants (Paratrechina longicornis who believed they transported a morsel of food to the nest) as with humans, under various combinations: a single individual, a small group and a large group.
The researchers also imposed restrictions on the human groups: some of them were prohibited from communicating during the test, and they were even given masks and sunglasses to hide their expressions. The objective of this limitation was to equalize the conditions with the ants, since their usual communication – by pheromones – was useless in the context of the maze.
The results
Ants improve in groups, humans don’t
The results, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)show that ants improve their performance by working together, while the performance of humans is negatively affected, especially when their communication is restricted.
The superior intelligence of humans allowed them to surpass the ants in the individual challenge: all the humans solved the puzzle, while it was rare for a single ant to do so. “But it seems that this simplicity is exactly what helps ants cooperate,” explains Feinerman. “The ants don’t try to understand the geometry of the maze, they just know that they must carry a large load together. Therefore, everyone is ‘on the same page’ and cooperating to carry the load.”
This simplicity is exactly what helps ants cooperate.
“The rules they use have evolved over the 150 million years of ants’ existence, and are very general, allowing them to find efficient solutions to a wide variety of problems, including our specific puzzle,” argues the scientist.
In contrast, it seems that it is the complexity of humans that makes their cooperation difficult. Unlike ants, each person who enters the puzzle understands it and has different ideas about the sequence of moves required. “These differences make it difficult for a human group to achieve consensus, and they often settle for bad solutions,” defends Feinerman.
In the case of humans…
How do we try to solve the maze?
When people are faced with it, they tend to mentally divide it into states (such as: “The T is between the first room” or “The T is completely inside the second room”, etc.); and to solve it, they usually follow a process of elimination, trying to move between states. “If they mistakenly determine that all the transitions are incorrect, including the correct one, they can be completely lost and, in this case, it could take a long time to solve the maze,” says Feinerman.
The ant trick
Ants, as a group, create a ‘short-term memory’ that they do not have individually
Ants, as a group, develop a collective memory that allows them to persist in their direction of movement. This phenomenon occurs thanks to the alternation between “informed leaders” and “uninformed followers”, who take turns leading the transportation of the load.
The first group is made up of ants that have just attached themselves to the load, and who know which direction to pull to reach the nest. But just ten seconds later, that ant becomes a follower, giving up its position to a new leader.
The result is a group short-term memory, which they would lack individually. “This memory is so robust that ants do not get confused, even when they hit a wall. Instead of backing up and choosing a random direction, the emerging group memory allows them to slide the load along the wall almost deterministically, allowing the ants to employ a strategy similar to the ‘right hand rule’. , a heuristic used by people to solve mazes,” describes Feinerman.
However, in humans, group adaptation was less efficient. When communication was restricted, people prioritized consensus over all other considerations. “People were less intelligent, ignoring their own ideas to adopt simpler and more obvious solutions,” says the researcher, “they became a little more ant in that sense.”
People seemed less intelligent… they became a little more ant in that sense
Performance improved when communication was allowed, but never equaled that of the best person in the group. The group tends to behave like the average of its members and, on some occasions, the collective performance was even worse than that of the ants.
All in all, Feinerman concludes that, although ants and humans are both highly social, we are so in extremely different ways. People rely on impressive individual cognition, but this, along with our conflict-inducing biology, makes cooperation difficult. In contrast, ants are simpler organisms, and their biology, which minimizes conflict, makes cooperation easier.
“What is still a fascinating mystery is why, of all the animals on the planet, practically only ants and humans achieve cooperative transport,” says the researcher.
Read also
Source: www.lavanguardia.com
