Intrinsic group behaviour: dependence of pedestrian dyad dynamics on principal social and personal features

TL;DR

This study quantitatively analyzes how intrinsic social and personal features influence pedestrian dyad dynamics in natural settings, revealing significant effects of gender, relation, age, and height on walking behavior.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive empirical analysis of pedestrian dyad behavior considering multiple intrinsic features and their interaction with crowd density in real-world environments.

Findings

Females walk slower and closer than males.

Couples walk very close and abreast, while colleagues are more separated.

Group velocity with children increases with density in low-medium range.

Abstract

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.

Full text

Erratum of arXiv:1703.02672, “Intrinsic group behaviour: dependence on gender, roles, purpose, age and height in pedestrian dyad dynamics”

Francesco Zanlungo zanlungo@atr.jp ATR International, Kyoto, Japan

In the paper I stated that “The pedestrians in this data set are all socially interacting, i.e. they were, on the basis of conversation and gaze clues, coded as not only moving together, but also performing some kind of social interaction”. While working on an extension on triads, I realised that, while indeed all groups have been actually labelled as social groups, my code was not checking for the presence of conversation and gaze clues. Any point of the paper in which I refer to “social groups” is thus valid, but the instances in which I talk about “socially interacting groups” should be read as ”social groups”