ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2019
Modular structure within groups causes information loss but can improve decision accuracy.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Self-organizing group structure through rewiring for collective decision-making in evolving environments.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Stakeholder diversity matters: employing the wisdom of crowds for data-poor fisheries assessments.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The functional aspects of selective exposure for collective decision-making under social influence.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Link updating strategies influence consensus decisions as a function of the direction of communication.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Beyond collective intelligence: Collective adaptation.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2023Review
- A simple cognitive method to improve the prediction of matters of taste by exploiting the within-person wisdom-of-crowd effect.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- A variational-autoencoder approach to solve the hidden profile task in hybrid human-machine teams.PloS one · 2022Article
- Social familiarity improves fast-start escape performance in schooling fish.Communications biology · 2021Article
- Modularity and composite diversity affect the collective gathering of information online.Nature communications · 2021Article
- The diversity bonus in pooling local knowledge about complex problems.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Hierarchical effects facilitate spreading processes on synthetic and empirical multilayer networks.PloS one · 2021Article
- The wisdom of stalemates: consensus and clustering as filtering mechanisms for improving collective accuracy.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Collective decision-making appears more egalitarian in populations where group fission costs are higher.Biology letters · 2019Article
- How does mobility help distributed systems compute?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Liquid brains, solid brains.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Many animal groups exhibit signatures of persistent internal modular structure, whereby individuals consistently interact with certain groupmates more than others. In such groups, information relevant to a collective decision may spread unevenly through the group, but how this impacts the quality of the resulting decision is not well understood. Here, we explicitly model modularity within animal groups and examine how it affects the amount of information represented in collective decisions, as well as the accuracy of those decisions. We find that modular structure necessarily causes a loss of information, effectively silencing the input from a fraction of the group. However, the effect of this information loss on collective accuracy depends on the informational environment in which the decision is made. In simple environments, the information loss is detrimental to collective accuracy. By contrast, in complex environments, modularity tends to improve accuracy. This is because small group sizes typically maximize collective accuracy in such environments, and modular structure allows a large group to behave like a smaller group (in terms of its decision-making). These results suggest that in naturalistic environments containing correlated information, large animal groups may be able to exploit modular structure to improve decision accuracy while retaining other benefits of large group size. This article is part of the theme issue 'Liquid brains, solid brains: How distributed cognitive architectures process information'.
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