Collective movements of pedestrians: How we can learn from simple experiments with non-human (ant) crowds

Understanding collective behavior of moving organisms and how interactions between individuals govern their collective motion has triggered a growing number of studies. Similarities have been observed between the scale-free behavioral aspects of various systems (i.e. groups of fish, ants, and mammal...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inPloS one Vol. 12; no. 8; p. e0182913
Main Authors Shahhoseini, Zahra, Sarvi, Majid
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States Public Library of Science 30.08.2017
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Subjects
Online AccessGet full text
ISSN1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI10.1371/journal.pone.0182913

Cover

Loading…
More Information
Summary:Understanding collective behavior of moving organisms and how interactions between individuals govern their collective motion has triggered a growing number of studies. Similarities have been observed between the scale-free behavioral aspects of various systems (i.e. groups of fish, ants, and mammals). Investigation of such connections between the collective motion of non-human organisms and that of humans however, has been relatively scarce. The problem demands for particular attention in the context of emergency escape motion for which innovative experimentation with panicking ants has been recently employed as a relatively inexpensive and non-invasive approach. However, little empirical evidence has been provided as to the relevance and reliability of this approach as a model of human behaviour. This study explores pioneer experiments of emergency escape to tackle this question and to connect two forms of experimental observations that investigate the collective movement at macroscopic level. A large number of experiments with human and panicking ants are conducted representing the escape behavior of these systems in crowded spaces. The experiments share similar architectural structures in which two streams of crowd flow merge with one another. Measures such as discharge flow rates and the probability distribution of passage headways are extracted and compared between the two systems. Our findings displayed an unexpected degree of similarity between the collective patterns emerged from both observation types, particularly based on aggregate measures. Experiments with ants and humans commonly indicated how significantly the efficiency of motion and the rate of discharge depend on the architectural design of the movement environment. Our findings contribute to the accumulation of evidence needed to identify the boarders of applicability of experimentation with crowds of non-human entities as models of human collective motion as well as the level of measurements (i.e. macroscopic or microscopic) and the type of contexts at which reliable inferences can be drawn. This particularly has implications in the context of experimenting evacuation behaviour for which recruiting human subjects may face ethical restrictions. The findings, at minimum, offer promise as to the potential benefit of piloting such experiments with non-human crowds, thereby forming better-informed hypotheses.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 14
content type line 23
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0182913