title: 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 capturing changes in behaviour via model parameters and leads to testable hypotheses on changes in crowd behaviour for different motivation levels. For example, we expect that rushed individuals more often evade to the side and thus display distinct emergent queue formations in front of a bottleneck. Our heuristics can be ranked according to the cognitive effort that is required to follow them. Therefore, our model establishes a direct link between behavioural responses and cognitive effort and thus facilitates a novel perspective on collective behaviour.
authors: Department of Computer Science and Mathematics, Munich University of Applied Sciences, 80335 Munich, Germany Department of Informatics, Technische Universität München, 85748 Garching, Germany m.seitz@hm.edu.
authors: Michael J
authors: 0000-0002-0397-5394
authors: MJ
authors: Seitz
authors: Department of Engineering Mathematics, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1UB, UK.
authors: Nikolai W F
authors: 0000-0003-0958-5191
authors: NW
authors: Bode
authors: Department of Computer Science and Mathematics, Munich University of Applied Sciences, 80335 Munich, Germany.
authors: Gerta
authors: G
authors: Köster
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D000066506:Heuristics / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009068:Movement; D012919:Social Behavior
keywords: cognitive heuristics; collective behaviour; decision-making; pedestrian dynamics; social interactions; spatial movement