HHNS Seminar Series: An ecological approach to understanding factors affecting individual’s collision avoidance behaviours with other pedestrians within different environments

Dr. Michael E. Cinelli, Associate Professor of Kinesiology and Physical Education at Wilfrid Laurier University, will present "An ecological approach to understanding factors affecting individual’s collision avoidance behaviours with other pedestrians within different environments" as part of the Human Health and Nutritional Sciences' Departmental Seminar Series. 

Following a 30-40 minute presentation by Dr. Cinelli, and a short Q&A session, everyone is invited to join us at Brass Taps (the campus pub) from 4:15 to 6:15 pm, where we’ve reserved a section for the event. Pub food will be available for attendees to enjoy while interacting with our guest speaker (and each other). 

More about Dr. Cinelli's research:

Navigating safely through a cluttered environment requires avoiding static and moving obstacles and, more specifically, other pedestrians. Fortunately, collisions between pedestrians or other objects rarely occur. This is due to a key role that vision plays in safely and efficiently guiding our routes away from collisions and towards open spaces. Visual information about an environment is gathered through eye movements allowing individuals to act appropriately (i.e., change speed, direction, or foot placement) in response to obstacles. In this way, vision helps pedestrians to select pathways that will guide them towards openings and away from structures that would cause injury. However, the manner in which specific optical variables (from vision) are used to control actions and safely avoid collisions with environmental objects are unknown. Fundamentally, there are differences between stationary and moving objects as well as between human and non-human obstacles. Therefore, it is critical to understand how actions differ when avoiding another person compared to a non-human object (stationary or moving). The focus of my research program is to determine what factors affect one’s decision-making capabilities when avoiding a collision with other pedestrians in different environments. My research has assessed both person-specific (i.e., size) and situation-specific (moving or stationary) characteristics of obstacles on avoidance behaviours in both real-world and virtual reality environments. To date, my research has facilitated our understanding the behavioural variables that control locomotion in cluttered environments. This type of information will help expand crowd simulation models used in many industries (film, urban design, architecture) to accurately simulate person-person interactions in natural environments.