文章基本信息

标题：Psychophysical Laws and the Superorganism
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作者：Andreagiovanni Reina ; Thomas Bose ; Vito Trianni 等
期刊名称：Scientific Reports
电子版ISSN：2045-2322
出版年度：2018
卷号：8
期号：1
页码：4387
DOI：10.1038/s41598-018-22616-y
语种：English
出版社：Springer Nature
摘要：Through theoretical analysis, we show how a superorganism may react to stimulus variations according to psychophysical laws observed in humans and other animals. We investigate an empirically-motivated honeybee house-hunting model, which describes a value-sensitive decision process over potential nest-sites, at the level of the colony. In this study, we show how colony decision time increases with the number of available nests, in agreement with the Hick-Hyman law of psychophysics, and decreases with mean nest quality, in agreement with Piéron's law. We also show that colony error rate depends on mean nest quality, and difference in quality, in agreement with Weber's law. Psychophysical laws, particularly Weber's law, have been found in diverse species, including unicellular organisms. Our theoretical results predict that superorganisms may also exhibit such behaviour, suggesting that these laws arise from fundamental mechanisms of information processing and decision-making. Finally, we propose a combined psychophysical law which unifies Hick-Hyman's law and Piéron's law, traditionally studied independently; this unified law makes predictions that can be empirically tested.