Cognitive Ecology: Animal Movement and Collective Decision-Making

Abstract

Cognition shapes how we perceive and react to our environment. Throughout my Master of Science, I have studied two major fields of animal cognition. My thesis first reports on the cognitive aspects of animal navigation in home ranging and seasonal migration, then I explore the development of group expertise through extensive experience with collective decision-making. The key contributions of the first manuscript (Chapter 2) are a condensed yet detailed summary of the behaviours involved in individual and collective animal movement, followed by research ideas to fill the gaps of the current literature. The key contribution of the second manuscript (Chapter 3) is developing an experiment to study group expertise, a topic that currently lacks controlled experiments, via testing the effect of experience on collective decision-making. This thesis expands the existing knowledge on animal movement and collective decision-making.