PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Chelsea N. Cook
AU  - Natalie J. Lemanski
AU  - Thiago Mosqueiro
AU  - Cahit Ozturk
AU  - Jürgen Gadau
AU  - Noa Pinter-Wollman
AU  - Brian H. Smith
TI  - Individual Learning Phenotypes Drive Collective Cognition
AID  - 10.1101/761676
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 761676
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/10/09/761676.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/10/09/761676.full
AB  - Collective cognition emerges from individuals responding to local information to make decisions. However, animals vary in how they learn to pay attention to important information, which has unknown consequences on collective behavior. We tested whether honey bee colonies comprised of individuals that differ in their capacity to focus their attention would choose to continue to visit learned, familiar food locations or switch to novel food locations. We found that colonies of focused bees preferred familiar food location, while colonies of less focused bees visited novel and familiar food sites equally. In mixed colonies, both types of bees preferred the familiar food location. Attention-focused individuals drive nestmates to their preferred location by recruiting them more intensely compared to unfocused individuals. Our results reveal that emergent collective behavior is driven by the attention-focusing abilities of individuals.One Sentence Summary Attentive individuals more strongly influence collective foraging decisions by focusing on and recruiting to preferred food locations.