抄録
When walking through a crowd, we have to pass through between people safely. How do we judge the passability of an aperture of this kind? Do we use the same information for an aperture composed of people as for one composed of other objects? Because studies on personal space have revealed that people have different sensitivities of personal space for approach from different directions (i.e., “anisotropy” of personal space) (Tanaka, 1973), we examined human aperture passability in terms of personal space in two experiments. In Experiment 1, the participants judged whether they could,without rotating their shoulder, pass between two stationary people or between two rectangular wooden posts. The two people to be passed through stood in four different orientations relative to one another and/or the participants; face-to-face, back-to-back,side-by-side facing towards or away from the participants. The wooden posts, which had the same width and depth as the two people, were set up in two directions (the wider sides facing each other vs. the narrower sides facing each other). In Experiment 2, the participants judged whether they could pass between two stationary people or between two human-shaped panels, which were set up in four different directions as in Experiment 1. In the analyses, we used the aperture-to-shoulder-width ratio (A/S) as an index of aperture “passability” judgment (Warren & Whang, 1987). We found that A/S was larger in the face-to-face condition than the other conditions. This is possibly because personal space is “anisotropic.” That is, when judging the passability of a space between two people, participants may consider the anisotropic personal space of each person. We also found that A/S was not significantly different across the board, implying that participants may have perceived a kind of “personal space” of the human-shaped objects, regardless of whether they were human or non-human.
