ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2019
The multi-dimensional nature of information drives prioritization of private over social information in ants.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Highly sensitive positron imaging reveals short-term food distribution patterns in ant groups.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Combining social and private information: How ants use pheromones and learnt cues to navigate.Learning & behavior · 2026Review
- A high-throughput and sensitive method for food preference assays in the argentine ant.Pest management science · 2025Article
- Naïve ants reach a food source quicker when encountering returning ants.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Differential Effects of Ephemeral and Stable Predator Chemical Cues on Spider Antipredator Behaviour.Journal of chemical ecology · 2024Article
- Directed retreat and navigational mechanisms in trail following Formica obscuripes.Learning & behavior · 2024Article
- Ants combine object affordance with latent learning to make efficient foraging decisions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Queens control caste allocation in the antProceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Article
- Ant Lasius niger joining one-way trails go against the flow.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Tandem running by foragingCurrent zoology · 2021Article
- All sugars ain't sweet: selection of particular mono-, di- and trisaccharides by western carpenter ants and European fire ants.Royal Society open science · 2021Article
- Negative feedback: ants choose unoccupied over occupied food sources and lay more pheromone to them.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Article
- Teaching laboratory for large cohorts of undergraduates: Private and social information in fish.Ecology and evolution · 2020Article
- Trail Pheromone Does Not Modulate Subjective Reward Evaluation inFrontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Regulation of Ant Foraging: A Review of the Role of Information Use and Personality.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Review
- The multi-dimensional nature of information drives prioritization of private over social information in ants.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Physical and social cues shape nest-site preference and prey capture behavior in social spiders.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
When personally gathered and socially acquired information conflict, animals often prioritize private information. We propose that this is because private information often contains details that social information lacks. We test this idea in an ant model. Ants using a food source learn its location and quality rapidly (private information), whereas pheromone trails (social information) provide good directional information, but lack reliable information about food quality. If this lack is indeed responsible for the choice of memory over pheromone trails, adding information that better food is available should cause foragers to switch their priority to social information. We show it does: while ants follow memory rather than pheromones when they conflict, adding unambiguous information about a better potential food source (a 2 µl droplet of good food) reverses this pattern, from 60% of ants following their memory to 75% following the pheromone trail. Using fluorescence microscopy, we demonstrate that food (and thus information) flows from fed workers to outgoing foragers, explaining the frequent contacts of ants on trails. Ants trained to poor food that contact nest-mates fed with good food are more likely to follow a trail than ants which received information about poor food. We conclude that social information may often be ignored because it lacks certain crucial dimensions, suggesting that information content is crucial for understanding how and when animals prioritize social and private information.
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