Insect Cognition & Collective Intelligence: How Ant Colonies Think Without a Brain

How Does Bayesian Modeling Relate to Insect Cognition?

Of woodlice and men: A Bayesian account of cognition, life and consciousness. An interview with Karl Friston. (Friston, Fortier & Friedman, 2018) is a published interview in ALIUS Bulletin: Martin Fortier and Daniel Friedman interview Karl Friston about the Free Energy Principle, cognition, life, and consciousness. It provides a conceptual discussion, rather than an experimental comparison of insect and vertebrate brain structures.

Can a Colony Be Studied as an Integrated Biological System?

Distributed physiology and the molecular basis of social life in eusocial insects (Friedman, Johnson & Linksvayer, 2020) develops the idea of distributed physiology in eusocial insects, connecting molecular processes with social organization. This perspective motivates studying regulation across individuals; it does not formalize colony attention as precision weighting or establish that workers are equivalent to neurons.

What Is the Active Inferants Framework?

Active Inferants: An Active Inference Framework for Ant Colony Behavior (Friedman et al., 2021) presents an Active Inference framework for ant colony behavior in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, including a Markov decision process simulation of ant foraging in an alternating T-maze. It considers how generative models and action-perception cycles can be used to model behavior across individual and colony scales. The framework is a theoretical and computational approach, rather than proof that ants literally represent the model variables.

Shared Protentions in Multi-Agent Active Inference (Albarracin et al., 2024) studies shared anticipatory structure in multi-agent Active Inference. It is relevant to coordination theory, but it is not an empirical demonstration that ants exchange posterior beliefs through pheromones.

What Do Gene Expression Studies Show?

Context-dependent expression of the foraging gene in field colonies of ants: the interacting roles of age, environment and task (Ingram et al., 2016) was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Gene expression variation in the brains of harvester ant foragers is associated with collective behavior (Friedman et al., 2020) appeared in Communications Biology. The 2016 study examines the interacting roles of age, environment, task, and light exposure in foraging-gene expression. The 2020 RNA-seq study associates among-colony expression differences with humidity response and dopamine-to-serotonin ratios. These associations do not establish that gene expression alone causes colony behavior.

What Can Pheromone Models Establish?

Stigmergy describes indirect coordination through changes to the environment. A single-pheromone model accounts for empirical patterns of ant colony foraging previously modeled using two pheromones (Saund & Friedman, 2023) provides a specific model of ant foraging patterns. Reproducing those patterns should not be generalized into a claim that natural pheromone networks solve arbitrary routing or optimization problems exactly.

References

1. Friston, Karl; Fortier, Martin; Friedman, Daniel. 2018. Of woodlice and men: A Bayesian account of cognition, life and consciousness. An interview with Karl Friston. ALIUS Bulletin. Publication source.
2. Friedman, D.A.; Johnson, B.R.; Linksvayer, T.A. 2020. Distributed physiology and the molecular basis of social life in eusocial insects. Hormones & Behavior. Publication source.
3. Friedman, Daniel Ari; Tschantz, Alec; Ramstead, Maxwell J. D.; Friston, Karl; Constant, Axel. 2021. Active Inferants: An Active Inference Framework for Ant Colony Behavior. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. Publication source.
4. Albarracin, Mahault; Pitliya, Riddhi J.; St. Clere Smithe, Toby; Friedman, Daniel Ari; Friston, Karl; Ramstead, Maxwell J. D. 2024. Shared Protentions in Multi-Agent Active Inference. Entropy. Publication source.
5. Ingram, Krista K.; Gordon, Deborah M.; Friedman, Daniel A.; Greene, Michael; Kahler, John; Peteru, Swetha. 2016. Context-dependent expression of the foraging gene in field colonies of ants: the interacting roles of age, environment and task. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Publication source.
6. Friedman, Daniel Ari; York, Ryan Alexander; Hilliard, Austin Travis; Gordon, Deborah M. 2020. Gene expression variation in the brains of harvester ant foragers is associated with collective behavior. Communications Biology. Publication source.
7. Saund, Eric; Friedman, Daniel Ari. 2023. A single-pheromone model accounts for empirical patterns of ant colony foraging previously modeled using two pheromones. Cognitive Systems Research. Publication source.