Department of Biology, University of Konstanz, 78464 Konstanz, Germany.
Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour, University of Konstanz, 78464 Konstanz, Germany.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2023 Apr 10;378(1874):20220062. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2022.0062. Epub 2023 Feb 20.
Many animal behaviours exhibit complex temporal dynamics, suggesting there are multiple timescales at which they should be studied. However, researchers often focus on behaviours that occur over relatively restricted temporal scales, typically ones that are more accessible to human observation. The situation becomes even more complex when considering multiple animals interacting, where behavioural coupling can introduce new timescales of importance. Here, we present a technique to study the time-varying nature of social influence in mobile animal groups across multiple temporal scales. As case studies, we analyse golden shiner fish and homing pigeons, which move in different media. By analysing pairwise interactions among individuals, we show that predictive power of the factors affecting social influence depends on the timescale of analysis. Over short timescales the relative position of a neighbour best predicts its influence and the distribution of influence across group members is relatively linear, with a small slope. At longer timescales, however, both relative position and kinematics are found to predict influence, and nonlinearity in the influence distribution increases, with a small number of individuals being disproportionately influential. Our results demonstrate that different interpretations of social influence arise from analysing behaviour at different timescales, highlighting the importance of considering its multiscale nature. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Collective behaviour through time'.
许多动物行为表现出复杂的时间动态，这表明它们应该在多个时间尺度上进行研究。然而，研究人员通常关注发生在相对受限的时间尺度上的行为，这些行为通常更便于人类观察。当考虑多个相互作用的动物时，情况会变得更加复杂，因为行为耦合会引入新的重要时间尺度。在这里，我们提出了一种技术，用于研究多个时间尺度上移动动物群体中社会影响的时变性质。作为案例研究，我们分析了金色小鱼和家鸽，它们在不同的介质中移动。通过分析个体之间的成对相互作用，我们表明，影响社会影响的因素的预测能力取决于分析的时间尺度。在短时间尺度上，邻居的相对位置最能预测其影响，并且影响在群体成员中的分布相对线性，斜率较小。然而，在较长的时间尺度上，相对位置和运动学都被发现可以预测影响，并且影响分布的非线性增加，少数个体的影响力不成比例。我们的结果表明，从不同的时间尺度分析行为会产生不同的社会影响解释，这凸显了考虑其多尺度性质的重要性。本文是关于“随时间变化的集体行为”讨论的一部分。
