Watch ants outsmart humans at group puzzle-solving activity VIDEO

When it comes to getting out of a tricky situation, humans have an evolutionary edge over other species thanks to our cognitive skills that allow us to solve problems in unfamiliar circumstances. If that is the case, why are we not cumulatively smarter when working in a team? A recent study by the Israeli Weizmann Institute of Science demonstrates that under specific circumstances, ants can, indeed, outperform humans in collective problem-solving tasks. 

The research focuses on "collective cognition," where groups achieve superior problem-solving compared to individuals, though this ability can falter due to poor coordination. The study, featured in an article by IFL Science, had ants and humans tested on a task known as the "piano movers puzzle," which requires moving a T-shaped object through a maze.

"Biological ensembles use collective intelligence to tackle challenges together, but suboptimal coordination can undermine the effectiveness of group cognition," the researchers explained. They chose the maze task to compare the problem-solving capabilities of ants and humans, both individually and in groups. For humans, communication was restricted in some trials to better match the natural coordination methods used by ants.

Ants of the species Paratrechina longicornis were used in their experiments while humans were split in groups ranging from small (7 ants or 6-9 humans) to large (80 ants or 26 humans). Humans did outperform ants when solving the task individually. However, when working in large groups, ants demonstrated significant advantages over humans. The researchers discovered that ants developed an "emergent" collective memory, which improved their ability to navigate the maze.

"Large ant groups exhibit emergent persistence, which expands their cognitive toolbox to include short-term memory—a building block of cognition: the memory of the current direction of motion is temporarily stored in the collective ordered state of the transporting ants, analogous to ordered spins in statistical mechanics," said the team, which published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. This emergent memory allowed ants to scan walls persistently and choose the shortest paths in the maze.

In contrast, humans in large groups often struggled to coordinate effectively. Their performance was hindered by interpersonal differences and a tendency toward "greedy" decision-making, where immediate goals were prioritized over long-term solutions. This approach sometimes led to worse outcomes for human groups compared to individuals navigating the maze alone.

"An ant colony is actually a family," said Professor Ofer Feinerman. "All the ants in the nest are sisters, and they have common interests. It's a tightly knit society in which cooperation greatly outweighs competition. That's why an ant colony is sometimes referred to as a super-organism, sort of a living body composed of multiple 'cells' that cooperate with one another."

The research highlights the remarkable efficiency of ant colonies as a collective. "Our findings validate this vision. We've shown that ants acting as a group are smarter, that for them the whole is greater than the sum of its parts," Feinerman said. However, the study revealed that human groups did not exhibit the same expansion of cognitive abilities through collective efforts. "The famous 'wisdom of the crowd' that's become so popular in the age of social networks didn't come to the fore in our experiments," he added.

This study underscores the differences in how ants and humans operate in groups, showcasing the evolutionary advantages of cooperation in tightly knit societies like ant colonies, while also pointing out the limitations of human group coordination in certain problem-solving scenarios.

By Nazrin Sadigova