Andreu Puy, Elisabet Gimeno, Jordi Torrents, Palina Bartashevich, M Carmen Miguel, Romualdo Pastor-Satorras, Pawel Romanczuk
Animals moving together in groups are believed to interact among each other with effective social forces, such as attraction, repulsion, and alignment. Such forces can be inferred using "force maps," i.e., by analyzing the dependency of the acceleration of a focal individual on relevant variables. Here, we introduce a force map technique suitable for the analysis of the alignment forces experienced by individuals. After validating it using an agent-based model, we apply the force map to experimental data of schooling fish...
April 30, 2024: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America