Scientific surprise: ants outperform humans in teamwork sciences
In a new study published in the journal BNAS, a research team conducted a unique experiment to compare the collective performance of humans and ants on a task that requires cooperation to move a large load with obstacles through a narrow maze. The study’s surprising findings shed light on the differences between individual and group cognition, and reveal the advantages and disadvantages of cooperation in group decision-making.
The study began by simulating a classic problem known as “piano moving,” a common challenge in the fields of motion planning and robotics, where a large, oddly shaped object is required to move through narrow, complex passages.
For example, if you move to a new apartment and want to move a table, sofa, or bed, you will hardly be able to move these pieces from one room to another, and you may make mistakes more than once and have to go back and place the pieces differently.
In their experiments, the researchers built a similar problem in two versions: a large first that allows humans to move an object, and a small, geometrically equivalent one that is used to test ants.
To motivate the ants to participate in the experiment, the payload was placed inside a bag containing food, making the ants believe that the payload was food that needed to be transported to the colony. As for the humans, they were simply asked to move the load from start to finish through the maze.
Collective cognition versus individual cognition
The study highlighted the concept of “collective cognition,” which is the ability to make collective decisions in a way that trumps individual cognition. Group cognition refers to cognitive traits that do not exist in a single individual but appear when a number of communicating individuals gather together.
In the study, when the ants join forces to carry the large load together, each is influenced by the actions of the others and tries to align with the group. This gives the group a short-term memory that allows it to continue in the direction of its movement. This memory is so strong that the ants do not get confused even when they collide with the wall in the narrow maze. In this context, one of the prominent results in the study was the superior performance of groups of ants compared to humans in the same task.
Because it is simple, individual ants are not trying to understand the “maze geometry,” all they understand is that they have to carry a large load together. Thus, all ants agree and cooperate in carrying the load together, and in contrast, the complexity of humans is what makes their cooperation difficult. Unlike the ants, each person enters the puzzle trying to understand it and with different ideas about the sequence of movements required to move it.
Interestingly, when the study restricted communication between members of human groups (by preventing them from communicating verbally) to simulate the limited communication that occurs between ants, people seemed to put consensus above all else.
