Abstract
Most studies on aperture passability focus on aperture passing involving non-human physical objects. In this study, we examined experimentally how participants pass between two box-shaped frames and between the same frames, each with a human confederate in it, facing various directions. Seven configuration conditions were set up, six of which differed in terms of the human confederates’ sets of directions in the two frames: face-to-face, back-to-back, facing toward or away from the participants, facing leftward or rightward from the participants’ perspective, and the empty frames condition without human confederates. There were seven aperture-width conditions—50, 55, 60, 65, 70, 75, and 80 cm—and participants walked at their normal speed through the apertures. We found that the participants’ shoulder rotation angle in the face-to-face condition was significantly greater than that in the empty frames condition. Further, the participants preferred to rotate their shoulders counterclockwise when our confederates in the aperture faced leftward, and clockwise, when they faced rightward. These results suggest that people change their passing-through methods by considering the social nature of the aperture as well as its width.
Highlights
Our living environment comprises of many types of furniture and apertures, and we need to safely pass through apertures constructed by the furniture
We examined the impact of the presence of humans in different configurations on aperture passability judgment without introducing the aforementioned confounding factor
Our hypotheses, which are based on anisotropic personal space, are as follows: Participants will rotate their shoulder to a greater extent and slow down before and during passing between two humans facing each other than in other configurations
Summary
Our living environment comprises of many types of furniture and apertures, and we need to safely pass through apertures constructed by the furniture. The other limitation of Hackney et al.’s (2015) study is that it is not yet clear whether the participants changed their passing methods (shoulder rotation angle, walking velocity, etc.) owing to the different geometrical shapes of the aperture in the objectobstacle and human-obstacle conditions (Figure 1). Our hypotheses, which are based on anisotropic personal space, are as follows: Participants will rotate their shoulder to a greater extent and slow down before and during passing between two humans facing each other than in other configurations This is because, if personal space is an anisotropic shape, the aperture might in effect be perceived as narrower in the former case for the same physical aperture width; humans have more personal space in the front than in the back or on the sides, which the passer would presumably not want to invade. The experimental procedures were approved by the Academic Research Ethical Review Committee at Waseda University
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