A common belief is that our modern, stimulation-filled environment encourages individualistic behavior (or anti-social behavior, depending on one's point of view), while simpler surroundings give rise to a more developed community life. New research at the Weizmann Institute shows that this assumption – at least for mice – is based in reality: Mice that have been raised in a stimulus-rich environment have less complexity in their social interactions than those growing up in more Spartan conditions. The findings were based on two innovative developments: The first is an automated system that continuously tracks groups of mice living in semi-natural conditions; and the second is a mathematical framework for analyzing the data, which enabled the scientists to characterize, in detail, the nature of the mice's collective behavior.
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