Ants vs Humans: Our insect friends are better team players
When you think of an ant, you rarely picture one alone. Instead you might envision them crawling across the ground in file or together lifting a tasty crumb to take back to the colony. This is because, like humans, ants are social creatures. Ants work together to find food, build nests, raise their young, and protect each other. Within this structure of survival, ants are particularly talented at a concept called collective cognition, the process by which ensembles think as a unit. Sometimes referred to as a sort of “hive mind,” collective cognition involves an interaction among three key elements: the individual abilities of the agents, the shared knowledge among the group, and the structure of their communication.
To better understand this concept within the ant world, scientists decided to ask if ants are actually better team collaborators than humans using a head-to-head test of cooperative puzzle-solving. In a controlled experiment, participants in either individual, small groups, or large groups of ants or humans solved the “piano-mover” puzzle: a task to guide an oddly shaped load across a narrow environment with specific maneuvering required. As expected, ants performed better in larger groups; their collective cognition was increased and the puzzle was solved much more efficiently than when alone. In contrast, humans saw no significant advantage to solving this type of puzzle with more minds involved. Moreover, when tasked to perform the challenge with restricted communication resembling that of ants, the performance actually fell below the individual. This finding supports the idea that ant colonies are thought to be similar to one super-organism, while humans are more reliant on our verbal communication to work together.
As humans, we teach about the importance of teamwork from an early age. We use it to drive the idea that cooperation and communication – things that have literally propelled us to the moon – are important to learn and develop. However, this experiment reveals that we do not perform well in collective cognition. It seems that in contrast to ants, we need to use both our individual talents and unique verbal communication to achieve true greatness.
This study was led by Tabea Dreyer, a researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in the laboratory of Ofer Feinerman.
Managing Correspondent: Morgan Glass
Press Article: Ants best humans at test of collective intelligence, Science-AAAS
Original Research Article: Comparing cooperative geometric puzzle solving in ants versus humans, PNAS
Image Credit: “Talk”, Mayur Kotlikar, flickr