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Into behavioural ecology / navigation / collective behaviour & more

Joe Morford

Check out this work on navigation in shearwaters! These seabirds navigate long distances to forage and migrate, but here we focus on their navigation around their breeding islands, finding that birds could distinguish shorter routes home despite relatively small differences in travel distances!

This highlights how collective intelligence - better decision-making in larger groups - can emerge through better memory of learned solutions across group members!

New theme issue of #PhilTransB: The evolution of collective intelligence. Read #OA: buff.ly/f0gWUxH

Migrated to Bluesky as I'm excited to share our new paper on collective route memories in homing pigeons: rdcu.be/e73Qk We found flocks remembered old routes better than pigeons flying alone, likely because different birds remembered different parts of the route!

Thank you to my coauthors @plewin.bsky.social, @richardpmann.bsky.social, @chriskrupenye.bsky.social & @dorabiro.bsky.social and to @templetonworld.bsky.social for making this work possible!

Check out our new paper on logical reasoning in chimpanzees, led by @drelizabethwarren.bsky.social!!

Can chimpanzees prepare for mutually exclusive possibilities individually or collectively? Check out our new paper in Phil Trans @royalsociety.org, led by @drelizabethwarren.bsky.social, and funded by @templetonworld.bsky.social! And stay tuned for the next paper, clarifying the mechanism!

🥳 New paper alert 🥳 The first of the data chapters from my DPhil, and the works from my first few field seasons on Skomer, is out! "Shearwaters make efficient navigational decisions, even at very fine scales" - doi.org/10.1242/jeb.... A huge thank you to everyone involved 🩵

New paper alert! 📢 Out now, fully #openaccess, in a special issue of Phil Trans on the evolution of collective intelligence (1/4) royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

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Intelligent agents can still take irrational actions and, sometimes, groups of animals are better at making good decisions than their constituent individuals. Read the latest article from the TWCF-funded project, “Rationality and Reason beyond the Individual“ project below.

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Abstract. In both humans and non-human animals, collectives can sometimes overcome individual cognitive biases or shortcomings to execute more rational beh

royalsocietypublishing.org

Chimpanzees spontaneously prepare for mutually exclusive possibilities, and collective context strengthens this behaviour

Joe Morford

Royal Society Publishing

Chris Krupenye

Lewis Lancaster

Elizabeth Warren

New paper alert! 📢 Out now, fully #openaccess, in a special issue of Phil Trans on the evolution of collective intelligence (1/4) royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

1mo

Templeton World Charity Foundation

Abstract. In both humans and non-human animals, collectives can sometimes overcome individual cognitive biases or shortcomings to execute more rational beh

royalsocietypublishing.org

Chimpanzees spontaneously prepare for mutually exclusive possibilities, and collective context strengthens this behaviour

Elizabeth Warren