Despite its importance, human collective intelligence remains
enigmatic. We know what features are predictive of collective
intelligence in human groups, but we do not understand
the specific mechanisms that lead to the emergence of this distributed
information processing ability. In contrast, there is
a well-developed literature of experiments that have exposed
the mechanisms of collective intelligence in nonhuman animal
species. We adapt a recent experiment designed to study
collective sensing in groups of fish in order to better understand
the mechanisms that may underly the emergence of collective
intelligence in human groups. We find that humans in
our experiments act at a high level like fish but with two additional
behaviors: independent exploration and targeted copying.
These distinctively human activities may partially explain
the emergence of collective sensing in our task environment at
group sizes and on times scales orders of magnitudes smaller
than were observed in fish.