Keeping it together: the effect of familiarity, personality, and active interactions on group coordination
type: CreativeWork
description: Group coordination is a universal feature of social life. Animals form social groups for a variety of reasons, including predator evasion and more efficient foraging, and individuals living in social groups must coordinate their activities in order for groups to function. Consequently, the factors that facilitate or impede group coordination are of great interest in understanding the lives of social animals. Familiarity between individuals has well-documented effects on group coordination, with familiar groups outperforming unfamiliar ones in predator evasion, foraging, and cohesion. Individuals also generally prefer to coordinate with familiar conspecifics over unfamiliar ones. Despite these advantages, the mechanisms through which familiarity might aid group coordination are poorly understood. Similarly, the individual personalities of group members have well-documented effects on group performance: bold individuals are more likely to be ‘leaders’ and determine the direction of group movements, and groups comprised of individuals of differing personalities outperform groups of all bold or all shy individuals. While the effect of individual personalities on group behaviour has been recorded extensively, the ways in which individuals affect each other’s behaviour are still poorly documented. In particular, active interactions where one individual can directly affect the behaviour of others have received limited attention, as it is difficult to distinguish such actions from passive effects. I used two systems to investigate how individual behaviours can lead to group coordination. In three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus), well-established boldness assays allowed me to assess the effects of personality and familiarity on 1) coordination between pairs of fish; I found that individuals in unfamiliar pairs exhibited coordination patterns consistent with their individual personalities, with bold individuals more likely to leave cover independently, while in f…
abstract: Group coordination is a universal feature of social life. Animals form social groups for a variety of reasons, including predator evasion and more efficient foraging, and individuals living in social groups must coordinate their activities in order for groups to function. Consequently, the factors that facilitate or impede group coordination are of great interest in understanding the lives of social animals. Familiarity between individuals has well-documented effects on group coordination, with familiar groups outperforming unfamiliar ones in predator evasion, foraging, and cohesion. Individuals also generally prefer to coordinate with familiar conspecifics over unfamiliar ones. Despite these advantages, the mechanisms through which familiarity might aid group coordination are poorly understood. Similarly, the individual personalities of group members have well-documented effects on group performance: bold individuals are more likely to be ‘leaders’ and determine the direction of group movements, and groups comprised of individuals of differing personalities outperform groups of all bold or all shy individuals. While the effect of individual personalities on group behaviour has been recorded extensively, the ways in which individuals affect each other’s behaviour are still poorly documented. In particular, active interactions where one individual can directly affect the behaviour of others have received limited attention, as it is difficult to distinguish such actions from passive effects. I used two systems to investigate how individual behaviours can lead to group coordination. In three-spined sticklebacks (Gasterosteus aculeatus), well-established boldness assays allowed me to assess the effects of personality and familiarity on 1) coordination between pairs of fish; I found that individuals in unfamiliar pairs exhibited coordination patterns consistent with their individual personalities, with bold individuals more likely to leave cover independently, while in f…
author: Riley, Riva Jyoti
language: en
keywords: Social behaviour, familiarity, group coordination
license: https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/cdeef71b-6373-4e42-b422-06c70f8573b3/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2019-01-25
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:21Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.35774