To the untrained eye, the movement of children in a classroom might look haphazard.
But a team of researchers recently found that during group interactions, children form small social groups, interact, and dissolve these groups in a similar way to the liquid-vapor coexistence phase of water.
"The results shed light on the physics of social interaction in human movement with implications for fields including behavioral science, biological science, and epidemiology," said Debasish Sarker, a physics Ph.D. candidate at the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences and the co-lead author of a recent article on this research with Ph.D. alumnus Yi Zhang. "For example, how children form and leave social groups can provide insight into their social development and how disease may spread in groups."
This interdisciplinary study was a collaboration between the physics and psychology departments at the University of Miami and researchers from Chemnitz University of Technology, Emory University, and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta's Marcus Autism Center. Sarker and Zhang worked under the guidance of Chaoming Song, an associate professor in the Department of Physics. In the Department of Psychology, graduate student Samantha Mitsven played a key role in data collection, with Daniel Messinger and Lynn Perry providing essential insights into human behavior dynamics and social interactions. Together, the team employed radio frequency identification technology attached to vests specially designed for tracking children's movements in classroom settings.
The statistical patterns the researchers discovered showed that students in classrooms behaved like molecules in a liquid-vapor coexistence state, some coalescing into small groups while others freely entered and exited these groups, behaving like gas particles. The researchers coined this phenomenon the "social phase" of human movement.
So, how is the newly identified "social phase" of preschooler movement relevant?
In addition to the applications in behavioral science and epidemiology, the research also has implications for crowd management and emergency protocols.
"If you have to evacuate the classroom in an emergency situation, it is important to use scientific principles to optimize strategies for evacuating the building the fastest way possible," Sarker said. "You have to understand how the crowd movement works and how humans interact in these situations."
Sarker's research paper, "Emergence of social phases in human movement," was recently published in the academic journal Physical Review E.
This research accomplishment gained recognition by the American Physical Society through a feature in their Physics Magazine, as well as coverage in Physics World, Phys.org, and Nature. The Frost Institute for Data Science & Computing also shared Sarker's publication on their website.
In future studies, Sarker plans to continue identifying patterns in how children are spatially aligned during social interactions. He and his team are also developing a more comprehensive model for capturing the social forces that drive children's movements in classrooms.
Sarker's research was partially funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Institute of Education Sciences, Marcus Autism Center, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, and the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative.
