  Living organisms process information to interact and adapt to their changing
environment with the goal of finding food, mates or averting hazards. The
structure of their niche has profound repercussions by both selecting their
internal architecture and also inducing adaptive responses to environmental
cues and stimuli. Adaptive, collective behaviour underpinned by specialized
optimization strategies is ubiquitously found in the natural world. This
exceptional success originates from the processes of fitness and selection.
Here we prove that a universal physical mechanism of a nonequilibrium
transition underlies the collective organization of information-processing
organisms. As cognitive agents build and update an internal, cognitive
representation of the causal structure of their environment, complex patterns
emerge in the system, where the onset of pattern formation relates to the
spatial overlap of cognitive maps. Studying the exchange of information among
the agents reveals a continuous, order-disorder transition. As a result of the
spontaneous breaking of translational symmetry, a Goldstone mode emerges, which
points at a collective mechanism of information transfer among cognitive
organisms. Taken together, the characteristics of this phase transition
consolidate different results in cognitive and biological sciences in a
universal manner. These finding are generally applicable to the design of
artificial intelligent swarm systems that do not rely on centralized control
schemes.
