Collective responses of flocking sheep (Ovis aries) to a herding dog (border collie).

Group-living organisms commonly exhibit collective escape responses, yet how information flows among group members in these events remains an open question. Here, we study the collective responses of a sheep flock (Ovis aries) to a shepherd dog (border collie) in a driving task between two well-defined target points. We collected high-resolution spatiotemporal data from 14 sheep and the dog, using Ultra-Wide-Band tags attached to each individual.

Collective information processing in human phase separation.

In our digital societies, individuals massively interact through digital interfaces whose impact on collective dynamics can be important. In particular, the combination of social media filters and recommender systems can lead to the emergence of polarized and fragmented groups. In some social contexts, such segregation processes of human groups have been shown to share similarities with phase separation phenomena in physics.