ArticleNature human behaviour2021
Spontaneous synchronization of motion in pedestrian crowds of different densities.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 72 citations in OpenAlex.
- Individual locomotor bias drives counterclockwise motion in pedestrian crowds.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Unraveling human crowd dynamics through the foot tracking of pedestrians.Science advances · 2025Article
- In sync with oneself: spontaneous intrapersonal coordination and the effect of cognitive load.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Experimental study on the synchronization mechanism and trigger characteristic density of vertical evacuation in crowds.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Non-local interaction in discrete Ricci curvature-induced biological aggregation.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Robust spatial self-organization in crowds of asynchronous pedestrians.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- Modelling physical contacts to evaluate the individual risk in a dense crowd.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- An ecological study protocol for the multimodal investigation of the neurophysiological underpinnings of dyadic joint action.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2023Article
- Spontaneous gait phase synchronization of human to a wheeled mobile robot with replicating gait-induced upper body oscillating motion.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Measuring Dynamics in Evacuation Behaviour with Deep Learning.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Interacting pedestrians in a crowd spontaneously adjust their footsteps and align their respective stepping phases. This self-organization phenomenon is known as synchronization. However, it is unclear why and how synchronization forms spontaneously under different density conditions, or what functional benefit synchronization offers for the collective motion of humans. Here, we conducted a single-file crowd motion experiment that directly tracked the alternating movement of both legs of interacting pedestrians. We show that synchronization is most likely to be triggered at the same density at which the flow rate of pedestrians reaches a maximum value. We demonstrate that synchronization is established in response to an insufficient safety distance between pedestrians, and that it enables pedestrians to realize efficient collective stepping motion without the occurrence of inter-person collisions. These findings provide insights into the collective motion behaviour of humans and may have implications for understanding pedestrian synchronization-induced wobbling, for example, of bridges.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.