Fig. 7. Neural crest cell collectives intelligently alter the behavior of their component cells to achieve target morphology.

Regulative compensatory migration in migrating neural crest cells demonstrates collective intelligence by placing the goal of the individual and the goal of the collective in opposition (a). During normal development neural crest cells integrate signaling cues to migrate dorsal to ventral along the forming embryonic body. When an arch is ablated, cells will move anteriorly or posteriorly instead of dorsoventrally to fill this missing arch thus achieving the correct target morphology of the collective behavior through movement patterns contrary to the individual cell’s normal optimal path^158,159. Applying our perceptual field framework, the expanded collective perceptual field contains a more attractive path to achieving the cell’s goal than its individual perceptual field does, and thus is undergoes compensatory rather than normal migration. Inter-domain grafting experiments demonstrate the expanded time-domain perceptual field of a collective intelligence (b). When grafted from one Hox domain to another, individual rhombomere or neural crest cells will lose the memory of their original Hox gene inductive event and adopt the expression pattern of their neighbors^161,162. Similarly grafted collectives, in contrast, maintain their previously induced state suggesting increased memory due to their collective intelligence.