How cognitive heuristics can explain social interactions in spatial movement.

ABSTRACT: The movement of pedestrian crowds is a paradigmatic example of collective motion. The precise nature of individual-level behaviours underlying crowd movements has been subject to a lively debate. Here, we propose that pedestrians follow simple heuristics rooted in cognitive psychology, such as 'stop if another step would lead to a collision' or 'follow the person in front'. In other words, our paradigm explicitly models individual-level behaviour as a series of discrete decisions. We show that our cognitive heuristics produce realistic emergent crowd phenomena, such as lane formation and queuing behaviour. Based on our results, we suggest that pedestrians follow different cognitive heuristics that are selected depending on the context. This differs from the widely used approach of capturin

SUBMITTER: Seitz MJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5014069 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature