Zachary Kilpatrick

Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics, University of Colorado Boulder

Diversity and heterogeneity can improve the efficiency of collective decisions

April 14, 2022 - 2:50 PM Eastern Time

Location:

UVM Innovation Hall, Room E100, Burlington Vermont, USA

Virtual Location:

Zoom

Talk Abstract:

Many organisms regularly make decisions regarding foraging, home-site selection, mating, and danger avoidance in groups ranging from hundreds up to millions of individuals. These decisions involve evidence-accumulation processes by individuals and information exchange within the group. Moreover, these decisions take place in complex, dynamic, and spatially structured environments, which shape the flow of information between group mates. We will present a statistical inference model for framing evidence accumulation and belief sharing in groups and some examples of how interactions shape decision efficiency in groups. Our canonical model is of Bayesian agents deciding between two equally likely options by accumulating evidence to a threshold. First passage times and error rates can be accurately estimated using asymptotics for order statistics in the limit of large group sizes. When neighbors only share their decisions with each other, groups comprised of individuals with a distribution of decision thresholds make more efficient decisions than homogeneous ones. To conclude, we will briefly discuss specific examples of the impacts of spatial and communication heterogeneity on collective decision making in foraging animal groups like honey bees and primates.

Speaker Bio:

Zachary Kilpatrick is an Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado Boulder and a Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science. His research interests are in the fields of applied dynamical systems, mathematical neuroscience, and collective behavior. He uses methods in stochastic processes, applied PDE, and asymptotic analysis to understand the cognitive mechanisms underlying decision-making, short term memory, and foraging. Zack has a BA in Computational and Applied Mathematics as well as a BA in History from Rice University (2005). After obtaining his PhD in Mathematics (2010) from University of Utah (in the Mathematical Biology Group), he spent two years as an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh. Zack started his first tenure track position in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Houston in 2012, and then moved to CU Boulder in 2016. In his spare time, he cooks, eats, runs, hikes, mountain bikes, and skis.