However, the authors did not investigate how colony performance (i.e. speed, accuracy and cohesion) may be affected by such aversion; additionally, they were unable to detect a similar phenomenon for high-quality nest sites: colonies familiarized with high quality nest sites showed neither aversion nor attraction towards these sites in later emigrations [19].
Early gathering of information for later use is therefore an effective strategy allowing T. albipennis colonies to improve simultaneously all aspects of the decision-making process – i.e. speed, accuracy and cohesion – and partly circumvent the speed-accuracy trade-off classically observed during emigrations.
As a result, decision accuracy and group cohesion cannot usually be improved without sacrificing decision speed, and vice versa.
More specifically, we investigated whether familiarization with high quality nest sites had an impact on colony performance in terms of emigration speed, nest choice accuracy and group cohesion.
In this study, we experimentally investigated the effects of prior knowledge of the environment on speed, accuracy and group cohesion and their trade-offs in a collective decision-making process: nest emigration by the house-hunting ant Temnothorax albipennis.
Gathering information while the nest is still intact should therefore greatly increase colony performance during later emigrations by simultaneously improving emigration speed, decision accuracy and group cohesion at relatively low costs and risks.
These results are quite striking, as speed and accuracy of T. albipennis emigrations have repeatedly been shown to be subject to a trade-off, i.e. nest choice accuracy (and group cohesion) cannot be improved without having to spend more time in the decision-making process.
In these specific experimental conditions (arguably more realistic than those in experiments 1 and 2, because colonies in their natural environment should encounter several suitable nesting cavities of different qualities) gathering information prior to emigration therefore allowed to improve simultaneously speed, accuracy and group cohesion.
In order to improve the quality of their compositions in terms of linguistic accuracy (e.g., grammar, lexis, spelling, and punctuation), coherence and cohesion, they represented their responses through rereading and rewriting.
However, increasing accuracy and/or cohesion usually decreases decision speed and vice-versa.
The squad lacked experience, organization and cohesion.
