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

Abstract

Sociality is the tendency to spontaneously interact with others to establish and maintain relationships. Some approaches, including questionnaires, tests, controlled experiments, and qualitative field research, cannot capture complex social interactions, such as in children during nursery activities, because of problems with ecological validity and the labor cost of analysis. Here, we introduced a new methodology for the quantitative analysis of spontaneous social movement and investigated children’s group behavior using position data. We periodically visited a nursery and recorded videos of eurhythmics, in which children move in tune with music, in different classes. The results revealed that children in the six-year-old class approached others in a short period of time (within one second) and established group behavior like that in a game of tag. It can be interpreted that such social behavior may include actions related to the cognition of anticipating others’ behaviors in a complex situation. Although only a small amount of data could be acquired, this study suggests one of the characteristics of social behaviors in the classroom considering an ecological approach.

Analysis of group behavior based on sharing heterogeneous roles in a triad using a coordinated drawing task

“…Sociality is the tendency to involve oneself with others spontaneously ( De Jaegher et al, 2010 ; Amici and Widdig, 2019 ; Ichikawa et al, 2021 ); humans who interact based on sociality change their environments ( Sebanz et al, 2006 ). Social interactions are observed in living organisms including non-humans and serve as a foundation for various activities.…”

“…To understand complex and dynamically planned coordination, it is necessary to consider an appropriate task that satisfies the following two conditions ( Ichikawa and Fujii, 2020 ): (1) Group behavior is controlled, which indicates that a group goal is clear, and each member’s action is based on the task rules. For example, in our previous study ( Ichikawa et al, 2021 ), which analyzed children’s group behavior during nursery activities, it was difficult to fully discuss cognitive information processing related to the feature, as children spontaneously and freely interacted with others. Additionally, it is hard to pursue the generality of these findings, as children’s data in nursery are precious and few.…”