A joint research team from Kyoto Institute of Technology, the University of Tokyo, and Nagaoka University of Technology has revealed that two pedestrians who face each other and pass each other naturally coordinate their walking speed and direction to achieve a smooth transition. did.
In a space where pedestrians come and go, it can be assumed that strangers cooperate with each other without special training to walk without bumping into others.However, the specific degree of coordination and what information is used to coordinate movements are not well understood.Therefore, this team conducted an experiment to examine walking motion and line of sight when two pedestrians facing each other pass each other.
As a result, it was first confirmed that the two pedestrians voluntarily matched their movements and timing until they passed each other, even though they were not instructed to walk in sync with the other.Therefore, when we asked one of the pedestrians to walk with a smartphone, assuming that their attention to the surroundings decreased, the degree of coordination in walking movement decreased significantly.This suggests that pedestrians achieve cooperation through mutual anticipation, in which they read each other's movements.
Next, in order to investigate the effect of eye contact, in an experiment in which one pedestrian wore mirrored sunglasses to block eye contact, there was no significant change in motor coordination.However, from the results of line-of-sight analysis, pedestrians tended to turn their eyes toward their future destination (the direction in which they would pass each other) before they passed each other.In addition, it was found that when the other party was walking around with their smartphone, they watched it for a significantly longer time.In other words, it can be said that pedestrians flexibly change their visual attention according to the uncertainty of the opponent's movement.
Based on the above, it is suggested that pedestrians may use the movement of the other's whole body as a clue to negotiate future movements, and unconsciously coordinate each other's movements.This result is expected to contribute to research on improvisational human behavior, pedestrian traffic, robot navigation, and so on.
Paper information:[iScience] Spontaneous behavioral coordination between avoiding pedestrians requires mutual anticipation rather than mutual gaze
