Influence of movement motivations on spatial and temporal features: a case study of preschool children passing through a right-angled corridor

Abstract

Pedestrian dynamics of preschool children in facilities has become a rapidly growing research topic due to its significant implications for children’s safety. This work investigates the movement characteristics of 40 preschool children passing through a 1.0 m wide right-angled corridor under low and high motivations. Under low and high motivation, preschool children were asked to walk through the corridor as normal and run through the corridor quickly as if in an emergency, respectively. The fundamental diagrams, velocity directions, passing positions, and spatial distributions are studied. Individual speed decreases with increasing density, both in normal and emergency conditions. In the turning region, children prefer running near the inner boundaries but walking along the outer boundaries. Running children keep a greater distance both from the boundaries and from other children, compared to walking children. The findings could help enhance the comprehension of the movement characteristics of preschool children.

Highlights

• The pedestrian flow characteristics of high- and low-motivated children passing through a right-angled corridor are compared.

• The children prefer walking along the outer boundaries and running along the inner boundaries around the turning region.

• Compared to walking children, running children keep a greater distance from the boundaries and other children.

KEYWORDS:

• Preschool children evacuation
• right-angled corridor
• pedestrian flow
• pedestrian dynamics
• movement motivation

Acknowledgements

Hongliu Li: Methodology, Formal analysis, Data Curation, Writing – Original Draft, Visualisation; Long Xia: Methodology, Writing – Review & Editing; Jun Zhang: Writing – Review & Editing, Supervision; Weiguo Song: Visualisation: Review & Editing, Supervision; Kwok Kit Richard Yuen: Supervision.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 72174189] and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [grant number WK2320000050]; the grant from the Research Grant Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China [grant number CityU 11214221]; the grant from the Program of Introducing High-level Talents of Shenyang Ligong University [grant number 1010147001105]; the grant from the State Key Laboratory of Robotics [grant number 2023-Z13].