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
