Research films

Collective appetite

How was your last eating experience? Were you alone or together with someone?

At the Collective Appetite project of the Psychological Assessment and Health Psychology Group at the University of Konstanz, we delve into the dynamics of eating within social groups, their underlying behavioural processes and how the context of our interactions shapes our perceptions and experiences.

Step inside our lab when looking at social interactions, where we use 3D body posture imaging technology to make behaviour visible - from subtle nuances of body language (kinesics) to the spatial dynamics (proxemics) of group movement.

Swarm robotics

The Cyber-physical Systems group studies swarm robotics, that is large-scale multi-robot systems, to answer questions like: How can many robots efficiently coordinate to complete complex tasks together? Some of the research is biologically inspired from natural collective behaviour, such as flocking and aggregation behaviours.

Meerkat chit-chat

Meerkats are social animals and spend their entire day in a group. They use special calls to help them locate their group mates. To stay together while searching for food, they exchange "close calls" with their neighbours. While running, meerkats produce rapid sequences of "short-note calls", likely to keep track of where the group is moving and avoid getting separated.

3D-MuPPET: 3D Multi-Pigeon Pose Estimation and Tracking

3D-MuPPET is a computer vision framework for posture estimation and identity tracking for up to 10 individual pigeons from 4 camera views, on both data collected in captive environments and in the wild.

SMART-BARN

SMART-BARN is a novel tool for studying animal behavior of animal groups at scale. The facility is developed by a multidisciplinary team of scientists working at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and The Centre of the Advanced Study of Collective Behavior (CASCB) at the University of Konstanz.

The geometry of decision-making in individuals and collectives

Choosing among spatially distributed options is a central challenge for animals, from deciding among alternative potential food sources or refuges to choosing with whom to associate. Using an integrated theoretical and experimental approach (employing immersive virtual reality), we consider the interplay between movement and vectorial integration during decision-making regarding two, or more, options in space. In computational models of this process, we reveal the occurrence of spontaneous and abrupt “critical” transitions (associated with specific geometrical relationships) whereby organisms spontaneously switch from averaging vectorial information among, to suddenly excluding one among, the remaining options. This bifurcation process repeats until only one option—the one ultimately selected—remains. Thus, we predict that the brain repeatedly breaks multichoice decisions into a series of binary decisions in space–time. Experiments with fruit flies, desert locusts, and larval zebrafish reveal that they exhibit these same bifurcations, demonstrating that across taxa and ecological contexts, there exist fundamental geometric principles that are essential to explain how, and why, animals move the way they do.