AI Insight
This study investigated how people judge apertures formed by human figures, finding that social cues influence decisions differently depending on the task. When judging which gap appeared wider, participants tended to choose the aperture aligned with a center avatar's facing direction, but when choosing which gap to walk through, they avoided that same direction. The relative social configuration of the apertures affected choices similarly in both tasks, suggesting that some social information is processed consistently while other cues are interpreted according to task context.
Why it matters
These findings have implications for designing spaces where people navigate around others, such as crowded public areas, and for developing more realistic navigation algorithms in robotics and virtual environments. Understanding how social cues shape spatial decisions could improve crowd management strategies and human-robot interaction design.
Understand the Science
People often need to choose a path through gaps formed not only by physical objects but also by other people. Although previous studies have shown that aperture perception and passing behavior are influenced by body-scaled physical constraints and social configurations, it remains unclear how such social information is used under different task contexts. The present study examined how the orientation and spatial configuration of three human-like avatars influenced judgments of two physically identical apertures. Two online experiments were conducted: a relative width-judgment task, in which participants chose the aperture that appeared wider, and a passage preference task, in which participants chose the aperture they would prefer to pass through. Generalized linear mixed models showed that the relative social structure of the two apertures, quantified as the difference in Degree of Preference (ΔDoP) between the right and left apertures, showed a similar association with choice across both experiments. In contrast, the effect of the center avatar direction (CAD) showed directionally opposite patterns across tasks: participants tended to choose the aperture aligned with the center avatar’s facing direction in the relative width-judgment task, whereas they avoided that direction in the passage preference task. A modest baseline tendency to choose the right aperture was observed across both experiments, and exploratory analyses indicated that the coupling between response time and confidence was stronger in the passage preference task. These findings suggest that social information is used differently across task contexts, with task dependence evident for the center avatar’s facing direction (CAD) but not for relative social configuration (ΔDoP).