Quantitative Analysis and Visualization of Children’s Group Behavior from the Perspective of Development of Spontaneity and Sociality

Quantitative analysis of spontaneous sociality in children’s group behavior during nursery activity

“…It can be interpreted that such interactions between children in the classroom may be more social and related to the cognition of anticipating others' behaviors in a complex situation. Although only a small amount of data could be acquired, our approach would be meaningful in contributing to advancing theories of developmental psychology and cognitive science (see S7 Note to refer new and original findings from the proceedings in the international conference [45]). Meanwhile, we should note that our work only suggests the possibility that these differences between age groups might be related to the previous findings of cognitive development in developmental psychology and cognitive science.…”

“…Here, our previous study serves as a preliminary investigation to implement our approach. In one project, we annotated videos of spontaneous social behaviors of each child with other children during running activities, which was the simplest action in eurhythmics (see details below studied activities in the Methods section) [45]. Specific haptic behaviors, which indicated spontaneous participation in group activities and involvements with others to establish good relationships, were annotated using ELAN software (https://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/ elan/), which loads a video and allows a user to perform manual annotations.…”

“…Based on the previous sections, we think that analyzing behaviors of children around six years of age is important because, in this period, the cognition of anticipating others' behaviors in complex situations develops and their behaviors may be more social. In addition, applying quantitative analysis used in studies of animal group movements and teamwork in sports is needed because it is difficult for our previous study mentioned above [45] to objectively explore the mechanism of group behavior based on spontaneous sociality through overall activities. This study quantitatively analyzed children's group behavior using position data.…”

“…This study quantitatively analyzed children's group behavior using position data. Our previous study [45] was conducted to hypothesize children's group behavior as a preliminary investigation. The findings provided necessary information to explain a basis for hypothesizing and we hypothesized group behavior related to the sociality in six-year-old children.…”