Flock mentality: How animals’ brains align naturally

Animals align and move as one when their brains use a shared, world-centered way to track direction. This idea shifts the story of animal alignment away from fixed rules and toward how navigation circuits work.

In tests with up to 320 simulated individuals, the study reports that alignment arose when each agent encoded neighbors relative to stable features in the environment.

The research was led by Mohammad Salahshour from the University of Konstanz (UK) and the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (MPIAB).

How animal brains align

The study connects how groups move in sync to the way the brain encodes and updates its sense of direction during navigation.

The key concept is allocentric spatial coding – a way of mapping space that stays fixed to the external world rather than rotating with the animal.

This is also referred to as “world-centered” coding. In simpler terms, it means the animal keeps its bearings using stable environmental cues, such as landmarks.

Decades of work in fruit flies show a neural compass that keeps a bump of activity moving around a circular circuit as heading changes. That circuit is a ring attractor network, a loop of neurons that sustains a localized bump of activity to represent angle.

Mammals also carry a head direction system with similar circuit logic, a point strengthened by recent research. The new model uses that shared logic to link perception directly to collective motion.

How animals align better

Animals can also use an egocentric, body-centered frame that tracks angles relative to the animal’s own orientation. The model shows alignment strengthens when individuals switch quickly between frames, which blends global stability with local responsiveness.

“It’s an elegant solution,” said Salahshour. When many agents each carry a ring attractor, their neural bumps tend to synchronize through perception. That shared timing drives spontaneous alignment without hard coded rules.

Switching is not a gimmick. The world centered view supports group alignment at large scales, while the body centered view helps respond to close neighbors and avoid collisions. Together, they stabilized motion in the simulations without a central commander.

Moving beyond old rules

For decades, models treated animals like self propelled particles, simple agents that follow local rules. Those rules include staying close, avoiding collisions, and turning to match neighbors.

Field data complicate that picture. In schooling fish, a detailed analysis found no evidence for explicit matching of body orientation across neighbors, pointing instead to attraction, repulsion, and who is ahead.

The new work offers a different path to alignment. When bearings to others are encoded in the world-centered frame, alignment can appear as a byproduct of shared neural coding rather than a rule to follow.

The model separates two kinds of animal alignment. Alignment across the whole group increased when agents used world-centered bearings and decreased when attraction simply pulled animals into a tight cluster.

How brain circuits sync

The heart of the model is the ring attractor network, which helps animals align by integrating sensory inputs and maintaining a stable bump of activity. Each animal’s bump marks its current goal direction.

As agents perceive one another, they effectively become moving inputs to one another’s rings. That feedback loops the brain into the group and the group back into the brain, which is why timing and representation matter.

At modest noise, world-centered coding yielded rich patterns. The simulations produced sudden expansions, fission fusion shifts, and clean direction changes, all without adding bespoke rules for each behavior.

At high attraction, body-centered coding produced dense, almost stationary packs. At matched settings, world-centered coding produced mobile, coherent groups. The difference came from how bearings were represented, not from tuning the rulebook.

From flocks to robots

The same neural recipe could guide swarm robotics, teams of simple robots that coordinate without a central controller. Robots that carry a ring-like heading circuit could align by sharing a world centered bearing, even without GPS.

Because switching between frames stabilized motion in tests, a practical controller could alternate between world centered and body centered steering. That could be useful when robots must avoid collisions in cluttered scenes yet still keep a shared course.

The claim is not that rules never matter in nature. Instead, the study argues that known navigation circuits can generate the very rules that earlier models had to assume. That trims the number of moving parts and tightens the link between brains and behavior.

The approach also explains why animal alignment sometimes looks local rather than global. If attraction is strong and noise is high, neighbors can agree while the whole group stalls, which matches observations of tight but wandering clusters.

More research on animal alignment

The model points to clear tests. If world-centered coding drives flocking, then disrupting an animal’s access to stable external cues should weaken global order more than local jostling.

It also suggests looking for brief, rapid resets between frames, which could show up as synchronized shifts in head direction circuits during collective turns. Modern neural recording and tracking make that testable.

The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

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