Fast and Flexible Group Decision-Making
- Speaker
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Naomi Ehrich Leonard, Ph.D.Chair and Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University
Presidential Lectures are free public colloquia centered on four main themes: Biology, Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science, and Neuroscience and Autism Science. These curated, high-level scientific talks feature leading scientists and mathematicians and are intended to foster discourse and drive discovery among the broader NYC-area research community. We invite those interested in the topic to join us for this weekly lecture series.
A wide range of animals live and move in groups. Many animals do better in groups than alone when, for example, foraging for food, migrating and avoiding predators. A key to group success is social interaction. Less well understood is how a group with no centralized control is capable of the fast and flexible decision-making required to carry out its tasks in an environment with uncertainty, variability and dynamic change.
In this Presidential Lecture, Naomi Ehrich Leonard will present a model of group decision-making dynamics that reveals the fundamental importance of nonlinearity, feedback and social interaction structure. The model provides new insights into fast and flexible decision-making: how indecision can be broken as fast as it becomes costly and how sensitivity to stimuli can be tuned as the context and environment change.