Abstract

Recent studies recognise the basic elements of cognition in the behaviour displayed by collectives, ranging from honeybee swarms to human societies. Indeed, an insect swarm is often considered a «super-organism» that appears to exhibit cognitive behaviour as the result of the interactions among the individual insects and with their environment. Progress in disciplines such as neurosciences, cognitive psychology, social ethology and swarm intelligence has allowed researchers to recognise and model the distributed basis of cognition and to draw parallels between social insects behaviour and brain dynamics. In this paper, we discuss the theoretical premises and the biological basis of a novel approach to the study of cognition, namely the Swarm Cognition approach. We discuss some case studies available in the literature, and outline the potentials of the synthetic approach to the study of Swarm Cognition, which exploits agent-based simulations and swarm robotic systems.