Iain Couzin, FRS

Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and Chair of Collective Behavior

University of Konstanz

Host(s): Vikram Gadagkar (Faculty)

The Geometry of Decision-Making

Animals moving through the world must constantly make decisions—where to feed, where to hide, and with whom to associate—yet most studies focus only on outcomes or reaction times, overlooking how motion itself shapes spatial decision-making. Here I present an analytically tractable model of the ring attractor, a key navigational architecture, and show how it maps onto classic decision models such as drift–diffusion and leaky-accumulators. This framework predicts how animals should move to maximize accuracy when faced with multiple alternatives, and I test these predictions using immersive virtual reality experiments with ants, fruit flies, locusts, and zebrafish. Results reveal that the brain reduces multi-choice decisions into a series of abrupt, critical binary transitions in space–time, making even noisy brains exquisitely sensitive to small differences between options. This mechanism proves robust across contexts—whether choices involve static refuges or mobile conspecifics—and highlights geometric principles of decision-making that extend from neural circuits to collective animal behavior, suggesting they are fundamental to spatiotemporal computation. I will demonstrate how these insights both inform new solutions for engineered solutions, such as in swarm robotics, as well as provide a new explanation for the emergence of collective motion in nature.

Relevant Publications: 

The behavioral mechanisms governing collective motion in swarming locusts

The geometry of decision-making in individuals and collectives

Tuesdays@10 is a signature Zuckerman Institute initiative that aims to expose researchers at all levels to high-quality science and stimulate scientific discourse. The speakers featured in this series represent various fields and techniques in neuroscience, and include invited guests of the Columbia Neuroscience Seminars, the Zuckerman Institute's Local Circuits Affiliates Program, and other special seminar series through a combined, collaborative effort of one or more of the following: Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, the Center for Precision Psychiatry, the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, the Department of Neuroscience, the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior and the Columbia Translational Neuroscience Initiative, and with support from the Kavli Institute for Brain Science. 

More information and a full schedule can be found here.