ArticleScientific reports2018
Psychophysical Laws and the Superorganism.
Article in Scientific reports, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Bio-inspired decision making in robot swarms under biases.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Best-of-n decision making by human groups.PloS one · 2026Article
- Neuronal connected burst cascades bridge macroscale adaptive signatures across arousal states.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Neuromodulatory control of complex adaptive dynamics in the brain.Interface focus · 2023Review
- Evidence of Critical Dynamics in Movements of Bees inside a Hive.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- The emergence of a collective sensory response threshold in ant colonies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Responsiveness to inhibitory signals changes as a function of colony size in honeybees (Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2021Article
- Article
- Weber's Law-based perception and the stability of animal groups.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Through theoretical analysis, we show how a superorganism may react to stimulus variations according to psychophysical laws observed in humans and other animals. We investigate an empirically-motivated honeybee house-hunting model, which describes a value-sensitive decision process over potential nest-sites, at the level of the colony. In this study, we show how colony decision time increases with the number of available nests, in agreement with the Hick-Hyman law of psychophysics, and decreases with mean nest quality, in agreement with Piéron's law. We also show that colony error rate depends on mean nest quality, and difference in quality, in agreement with Weber's law. Psychophysical laws, particularly Weber's law, have been found in diverse species, including unicellular organisms. Our theoretical results predict that superorganisms may also exhibit such behaviour, suggesting that these laws arise from fundamental mechanisms of information processing and decision-making. Finally, we propose a combined psychophysical law which unifies Hick-Hyman's law and Piéron's law, traditionally studied independently; this unified law makes predictions that can be empirically tested.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.