  The ability of biological and artificial collectives to outperform solitary
individuals in a wide variety of tasks depends crucially on the efficient
processing of social and environmental information at the level of the
collective. Here, we model collective behavior in complex environments with
many potentially distracting cues. Counter-intuitively, large-scale
coordination in such environments can be maximized by strongly limiting the
cognitive capacity of individuals, where due to self-organized dynamics the
collective self-isolates from disrupting information. We observe a fundamental
trade-off between coordination and collective responsiveness to environmental
cues. Our results offer important insights into possible evolutionary
trade-offs in collective behavior in biology and suggests novel principles for
design of artificial swarms exploiting attentional bottlenecks.
