Week 10: Cognition outside the individual

Swarms, notebooks and committees — and the finding that a group's failures are not its members' failures added up.

Part III — The control group26 April 2027Open the slidesWeek 10 seminarSchedule

Seeley and colleagues (2012) showed honeybee scouts send inhibitory stop signals specifically to bees advertising rival sites. Cross inhibition between evidence-accumulating populations is the same motif that breaks deadlock in neural decision circuits, operating thirteen orders of magnitude away in substrate. That is the strongest evidence in the course that we have been describing a class of solutions rather than a set of animals.

The rest is contested ground: the extended mind thesis against the coupling-constitution objection, and the group-estimate literature where Lorenz and colleagues (2011) and Becker and colleagues (2017) reach opposite conclusions depending on network structure.