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How a swarm moves
Testing how individual decisions give rise to collective motion in locusts.
This study revealed that locust swarming behavior emerges from internal decision-making processes rather than alignment with nearby individuals.
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Testing how locusts encode their neighbors
The virtual swarms distinguish two predictions: following visual motion, or choosing directions toward neighbors. The circular model compares these hypotheses against the locusts’ observed headings.
Figure 6 · Graving et al., Unwrapping Circular Statistics with Bayesian Multilevel Models. Unpublished manuscript supplied by the authors. Cropped from the manuscript figure.
My contribution
I collaborated with colleagues to analyze behavioral data from controlled lab and immersive virtual reality experiments, developing a Bayesian model to test competing mechanistic hypotheses of collective motion. Our results challenged classical alignment-based theories, showing that group coordination emerges from individual decision-making informed by neural representations of neighboring locusts.