Social Wayfinding

Social wayfinding can be described at three levels. First, individual’s spatial decision-making may depend on the presence or absence of other people. For example, someone may take a detour in order to avoid a crowd. Second, small groups of people may interact with each other while searching for a goal. Third, crowd dynamics may vary with respect to individual’s decisions and the cohesion of small groups in the crowd. Crowd dynamics is especially amenable to computational modeling because of similarities between crowd members and physical particles. Our current research in social wayfinding is divided into five projects.