Shahhoseini Zahra, Sarvi Majid
Centre for Disaster Management and Public Safety, School of Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Australia.
PLoS One. 2017 Aug 30;12(8):e0182913. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0182913. eCollection 2017.
Understanding collective behavior of moving organisms and how interactions between individuals govern their collective motion has triggered a growing number of studies. Similarities have been observed between the scale-free behavioral aspects of various systems (i.e. groups of fish, ants, and mammals). Investigation of such connections between the collective motion of non-human organisms and that of humans however, has been relatively scarce. The problem demands for particular attention in the context of emergency escape motion for which innovative experimentation with panicking ants has been recently employed as a relatively inexpensive and non-invasive approach. However, little empirical evidence has been provided as to the relevance and reliability of this approach as a model of human behaviour.
This study explores pioneer experiments of emergency escape to tackle this question and to connect two forms of experimental observations that investigate the collective movement at macroscopic level. A large number of experiments with human and panicking ants are conducted representing the escape behavior of these systems in crowded spaces. The experiments share similar architectural structures in which two streams of crowd flow merge with one another. Measures such as discharge flow rates and the probability distribution of passage headways are extracted and compared between the two systems.
Our findings displayed an unexpected degree of similarity between the collective patterns emerged from both observation types, particularly based on aggregate measures. Experiments with ants and humans commonly indicated how significantly the efficiency of motion and the rate of discharge depend on the architectural design of the movement environment.
Our findings contribute to the accumulation of evidence needed to identify the boarders of applicability of experimentation with crowds of non-human entities as models of human collective motion as well as the level of measurements (i.e. macroscopic or microscopic) and the type of contexts at which reliable inferences can be drawn. This particularly has implications in the context of experimenting evacuation behaviour for which recruiting human subjects may face ethical restrictions. The findings, at minimum, offer promise as to the potential benefit of piloting such experiments with non-human crowds, thereby forming better-informed hypotheses.
理解移动生物体的集体行为以及个体之间的相互作用如何支配其集体运动引发了越来越多的研究。人们已经观察到各种系统（即鱼群、蚁群和哺乳动物群体）在无标度行为方面存在相似性。然而，对非人类生物体与人类集体运动之间这种联系的研究相对较少。在紧急逃生运动的背景下，这个问题需要特别关注，最近有人采用对惊慌蚂蚁进行创新实验作为一种相对廉价且非侵入性的方法。然而，关于这种方法作为人类行为模型的相关性和可靠性，几乎没有提供实证证据。
本研究探索了紧急逃生的开创性实验，以解决这个问题，并将两种在宏观层面研究集体运动的实验观察形式联系起来。进行了大量关于人类和惊慌蚂蚁的实验，以代表这些系统在拥挤空间中的逃生行为。这些实验具有相似的建筑结构，其中两股人流相互汇合。提取并比较了两个系统的诸如排放流量和通过车头时距的概率分布等测量值。
我们的结果显示，两种观察类型所呈现的集体模式之间存在意想不到的相似程度，特别是基于总体测量。对蚂蚁和人类的实验共同表明，运动效率和排放率在多大程度上取决于运动环境的建筑设计。
我们的研究结果有助于积累证据，以确定将非人类实体群体实验作为人类集体运动模型的适用范围边界，以及测量水平（即宏观或微观）和能够得出可靠推断的背景类型。这在进行疏散行为实验的背景下尤其具有意义，因为招募人类受试者可能面临伦理限制。这些结果至少为用非人类群体进行此类实验可能带来的潜在益处提供了希望，从而形成更有依据的假设。
