Fig 1.
The influence of individual social thresholds and initial group organization on attention levels, collective coordination, and average individual speed.
As the individual’s social threshold increases (m), overall coordination in the group begins to rise then decays rapidly (a) because individual’s are less likely to pay attention to their neighbors (a, inset). Over time, the group’s average speed is a function of both the individual-level interactions and the initial conditions (b, c). Increases in social thresholds range from asocial behavior (random walk; black open circles) to social interactions of varying degrees (colored points). Insets in (b) and (c) illustrate the initial orientations of the prey. Increased social attention is reflected by a larger number of influential neighbors, Ni = |Ni| (Eq 4). When groups are initially disorganized (b) a lag in the average individual’s departure speed emerges as a consequence of the time needed to come to a directional consensus. When groups are already organized their social interactions have little feedback on collective speed (c). Model parameters: group size = 25, m: {0, 1.5, 2.5, 10.0}, v* = 0.44. Data represent mean values of 1,000 replicates per setting. Additional parameters are provided in S1 Table.
Table 1.
Game response variables, factors, and continuous predictor variables.
Fig 2.
The effect of target escape speed (ve, a) and social interaction thresholds (m), b) on player capture latency, PL.
Data in both (a) and (b) represent mean ± standard error (SE), corrected for repeated measures. In these trials prey groups were homogenous with members having the same social threshold (e.g., m = mT = mG) and these values were transformed for the LMM analyses as . Figure (c) shows the relative effect size for each of the underlying individual and group level properties that significantly influenced PL. See Table 1 for a full list of all local and global variables and S2 Table for the LMM results for (c).
Fig 3.
Effect of prey social threshold (m), target escape speed (ve), and the initial organization of the group (ρ0) on player capture accuracy, PA.
All data points in (a) and (b) show mean ± SE, corrected for repeated measures. All prey share the same social threshold (e.g., m = mT = mG) whose values were transformed as in Fig 2. Figure (c) shows the relative effect size for each of the underlying individual and group level properties that significantly influenced PA (S3 Table).
Fig 4.
The confusion effect on player capture latency (a) and accuracy (b) as a function of target social threshold and the visibility of its neighbors.
Trends are fit by regressing each response variable onto log(mT+1) with their 95% confidence intervals. Data points represent the means ± SE with error bars corrected for repeated measures.
Fig 5.
Time series of the kinetics underlying capture latency and accuracy.
Data show temporal trends in average prey speed (a), path tortuosity (b), and local spacing around the targets (c). Data are pooled across initial organizational conditions (group organization, ρ0) and exclude escape sequences (e.g., ve ≠ 10). Trend lines show the mean of each metric across replicates and their 95% confidence intervals. Vertical orange bands show the mean capture latency times for these conditions (mean ± 1 standard deviation, SD).