Flocking in complex environments—Attention trade-offs in collective information processing
Fig 4
Collective response to environmental cues.
a: The fraction of agents responding to DS directly rd (direct responders, solid lines), or indirectly via social interactions with direct responders ri (indirect responders, dashed lines), for k = 2 (blue) and k = 24 (red) versus DS density ρDS. b: DS avoidance A versus attention limit k for different DS densities ρDS. A = 1 corresponds to the DS avoidance of solitary (non-interacting) agents. c: Global fitness versus attention limit k and relative benefits of DS avoidance β at ρDS = 0.25. Red (blue) regions correspond to better (worse) performance of a collective than isolated individuals according to the fitness function used. d and e: Example snapshots of emergent collective behavior in structured environments with a circular, DS-free path. For low attention capacity (k = 1, e), individuals ignore the structure of the environment and align with the preferred direction of migration. At high attention capacity (k = 16, f), the collective behavior is dominated by the environmental structure and collective migration breaks down. f: DS avoidance A for the structured environment depicted in d, e versus attention limit k. A = 1 is the DS avoidance of solitary agents in the same environment. For all panels: Rinf = 0.1.