84,049 research outputs found
Anthropology of the Crowd, Blog 7
Student blog posts from the Great VCU Bike Race Book
Placing large group relations into pedestrian dynamics: psychological crowds in counterflow
Understanding influences on pedestrian movement is important to accurately simulate crowd behaviour, yet little research has explored the psychological factors that influence interactions between large groups in counterflow scenarios. Research from social psychology has demonstrated that social identities can influence the micro-level pedestrian movement of a psychological crowd, yet this has not been extended to explore behaviour when two large psychological groups are co-present. This study investigates how the presence of large groups with different social identities can affect pedestrian behaviour when walking in counterflow. Participants (N = 54) were divided into two groups and primed to have identities as either ‘team A’ or ‘team B’. The trajectories of all participants were tracked to compare the movement of team A when walking alone to when walking in counterflow with team B, based on their i) speed of movement and distance walked, and ii) proximity between participants. In comparison to walking alone, the presence of another group influenced team A to collectively self-organise to reduce their speed and distance walked in order to walk closely together with ingroup members. We discuss the importance of incorporating social identities into pedestrian group dynamics for empirically validated simulations of counterflow scenarios
Inflow process of pedestrians to a confined space
To better design safe and comfortable urban spaces, understanding the nature
of human crowd movement is important. However, precise interactions among
pedestrians are difficult to measure in the presence of their complex
decision-making processes and many related factors. While extensive studies on
pedestrian flow through bottlenecks and corridors have been conducted, the
dominant mode of interaction in these scenarios may not be relevant in
different scenarios. Here, we attempt to decipher the factors that affect human
reactions to other individuals from a different perspective. We conducted
experiments employing the inflow process in which pedestrians successively
enter a confined area (like an elevator) and look for a temporary position. In
this process, pedestrians have a wider range of options regarding their motion
than in the classical scenarios; therefore, other factors might become
relevant. The preference of location is visualized by pedestrian density
profiles obtained from recorded pedestrian trajectories. Non-trivial patterns
of space acquisition, e.g., an apparent preference for positions near corners,
were observed. This indicates the relevance of psychological and anticipative
factors beyond the private sphere, which have not been deeply discussed so far
in the literature on pedestrian dynamics. From the results, four major factors,
which we call flow avoidance, distance cost, angle cost, and boundary
preference, were suggested. We confirmed that a description of decision-making
based on these factors can give a rise to realistic preference patterns, using
a simple mathematical model. Our findings provide new perspectives and a
baseline for considering the optimization of design and safety in crowded
public areas and public transport carriers.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figure
Extended emotions
Until recently, philosophers and psychologists conceived of emotions as brain- and body-bound affairs. But researchers have started to challenge this internalist and individualist orthodoxy. A rapidly growing body of work suggests that some emotions incorporate external resources and thus extend beyond the neurophysiological confines of organisms; some even argue that emotions can be socially extended and shared by multiple agents. Call this the extended emotions thesis. In this article, we consider different ways of understanding ExE in philosophy, psychology, and the cognitive sciences. First, we outline the background of the debate and discuss different argumentative strategies for ExE. In particular, we distinguish ExE from cognate but more moderate claims about the embodied and situated nature of cognition and emotion. We then dwell upon two dimensions of ExE: emotions extended by material culture and by the social factors. We conclude by defending ExE against some objections and point to desiderata for future research
A large-scale real-life crowd steering experiment via arrow-like stimuli
We introduce "Moving Light": an unprecedented real-life crowd steering
experiment that involved about 140.000 participants among the visitors of the
Glow 2017 Light Festival (Eindhoven, NL). Moving Light targets one outstanding
question of paramount societal and technological importance: "can we seamlessly
and systematically influence routing decisions in pedestrian crowds?"
Establishing effective crowd steering methods is extremely relevant in the
context of crowd management, e.g. when it comes to keeping floor usage within
safety limits (e.g. during public events with high attendance) or at designated
comfort levels (e.g. in leisure areas). In the Moving Light setup, visitors
walking in a corridor face a choice between two symmetric exits defined by a
large central obstacle. Stimuli, such as arrows, alternate at random and
perturb the symmetry of the environment to bias choices. While visitors move in
the experiment, they are tracked with high space and time resolution, such that
the efficiency of each stimulus at steering individual routing decisions can be
accurately evaluated a posteriori. In this contribution, we first describe the
measurement concept in the Moving Light experiment and then we investigate
quantitatively the steering capability of arrow indications.Comment: 8 page
The Ethnic Matrix: Implications for Human Service Practitioners
Most human services practitioners at one time or another must confront cultural issues which in many ways have a direct impact on their role and effectiveness as helping professionals. This article links the phenomenon of ethnic identity to problems, practices, and policies encountered in the field of human services. Although most of the theoretical concepts presented here are related to counseling psychology and education, other practitioners with culturally diverse client populations will also find the information applicable to their work. The social scientist, teacher and researcher, who is often the disseminator of theoretical and methodological paradigms, should also find these observations useful. The professor of applied and theoretical humanistic studies in many instances is the one who lays the foundation for an understanding of how sociological, cultural, and political phenomena interact with the psychological. The primary purpose of this article, therefore, is to present a psycho-social model (the ethnic matrix) for understanding ethnicity and the ethnic process in American society, and show how this model can be used by practitioners and researchers to further expand their own work
LCrowdV: Generating Labeled Videos for Simulation-based Crowd Behavior Learning
We present a novel procedural framework to generate an arbitrary number of
labeled crowd videos (LCrowdV). The resulting crowd video datasets are used to
design accurate algorithms or training models for crowded scene understanding.
Our overall approach is composed of two components: a procedural simulation
framework for generating crowd movements and behaviors, and a procedural
rendering framework to generate different videos or images. Each video or image
is automatically labeled based on the environment, number of pedestrians,
density, behavior, flow, lighting conditions, viewpoint, noise, etc.
Furthermore, we can increase the realism by combining synthetically-generated
behaviors with real-world background videos. We demonstrate the benefits of
LCrowdV over prior lableled crowd datasets by improving the accuracy of
pedestrian detection and crowd behavior classification algorithms. LCrowdV
would be released on the WWW
Intrinsic group behaviour: dependence of pedestrian dyad dynamics on principal social and personal features
Being determined by human social behaviour, pedestrian group dynamics depends
on "intrinsic properties" of the group such as the purpose of the pedestrians,
their personal relation, their gender, age, and body size. In this work we
quantitatively study the dynamical properties of pedestrian dyads by analysing
a large data set of automatically tracked pedestrian trajectories in an
unconstrained "ecological" setting (a shopping mall), whose relational group
properties have been coded by three different human observers. We observed that
females walk slower and closer than males, that workers walk faster, at a
larger distance and more abreast than leisure oriented people, and that inter
group relation has a strong effect on group structure, with couples walking
very close and abreast, colleagues walking at a larger distance, and friends
walking more abreast than family members. Pedestrian height (obtained
automatically through our tracking system) influences velocity and abreast
distance, both growing functions of the average group height. Results regarding
pedestrian age show as expected that elderly people walk slowly, while active
age adults walk at the maximum velocity. Groups with children have a strong
tendency to walk in a non abreast formation, with a large distance (despite a
low abreast distance). A cross-analysis of the interplay between these
intrinsic features, taking in account also the effect of extrinsic crowd
density, confirms these major effects but reveals also a richer structure. An
interesting and unexpected result, for example, is that the velocity of groups
with children {\it increases} with density, at least in the low-medium density
range found under normal conditions in shopping malls. Children also appear to
behave differently according to the gender of the parent
Comparison of Pedestrian Fundamental Diagram Across Cultures
The relation between speed and density is connected with every
self-organization phenomenon of pedestrian dynamics and offers the opportunity
to analyze them quantitatively. But even for the simplest systems, like
pedestrian streams in corridors, this fundamental relation isn't completely
understood. Specifications of this characteristic in guidelines and text books
differ considerably reflecting the contradictory database and the controversial
discussion documented in the literature. In this contribution it is studied
whether cultural influences and length of the corridor can be the causes for
these deviations. To reduce as much as possible unintentioned effects, a system
is chosen with reduced degrees of freedom and thus the most simple system,
namely the movement of pedestrians along a line under closed boundary
conditions. It is found that the speed of Indian test persons is less dependent
on density than the speed of German test persons. Surprisingly the more
unordered behaviour of the Indians is more effective than the ordered behaviour
of the Germans. Without any statistical measure one cannot conclude about
whether there are differences or not. By hypothesis test it is found
quantitatively that these differences exist, suggesting cultural differences in
the fundamental diagram of pedestrians.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure
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