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.

Pedestrian collision avoidance with a local dynamic goal

“…The function H is completely general and, of course, it can take any form. Note that some previous works, have presented particular implementations, calling to this kind of approach "cognitive heuristic" [11,15].…”

“…Under this approach, the problem lies in postulating the heuristics required for computing the variable desired velocity depending on the environment. As in the traditional pedestrian theoretical models, any arbitrary heuristics can be proposed (for example, [11,14]) and then the free parameters could be tuned in order to obtain simulated trajectories that approach experimental micro or macroscopic data.…”

Investigation of Voronoi diagram based direction choices using uni- and bi-directional trajectory data

“…Based on it, determining the direction choice based on the cognitive process of a pedestrian is a promising modeling method. In [8], four kinds of heuristics, i.e., step or wait heuristics, tangential evasion heuristic, sideways evasion heuristic, and follower heuristic are proposed to represent the different pedestrian behaviors. Similarly, a simple logit based model could be given based on the three basic direction choices.…”

Parsimony versus Reductionism: How Can Crowd Psychology be Introduced into Computer Simulation?

“…Cognitive heuristics represent plausible decision-making processes and have already been used to describe local avoidance behaviour of pedestrians (Seitz, Bode, & Köster, 2016). They also seem appropriate for specific behavioural aspects, for example, the route choice in complex spatial layouts (e.g., Hoogendoorn & Bovy, 2004;Kneidl, Borrmann, & Hartmann, 2012).…”

“…We put forward that one avenue to negotiate the complexities of social psychological models with the necessary parsimonious approach of mathematical modelling is through cognitive heuristics (Gigerenzer, 2008;Gigerenzer, Todd, & A.B.C. Research Group, 1999;Seitz, Bode, & Köster, 2016). Cognitive heuristics allow for agents to make flexible decisions based on a set of criteria, which provides ample PARSIMONY VERSUS REDUCTIONISM 6 ground to incorporate cognition we know from social psychology into a rule-based model of social behaviour.…”