Understanding pedestrian crowd panic: a review on model organisms approach

Understanding how crowds behave during collective displacement is at the heart of both pedestrian traffic engineering and ‘movement ecology’. Perhaps the most critical reason for studying collective human dynamics under emergency/panic conditions is the lack of complementary data to develop and validate an explanatory model. A little used alternative is to study non-human model organisms. In this paper, we review experiences in using non-human organisms to study crowd panic in the literature. We then highlight the potential contribution that research with biological entities could make to understand the complex pedestrian behaviour and the enhancement of pedestrian safety during emergency/panic conditions. We also emphasise that understanding of behavioural similarities and dissimilarities between humans and animals is required for developing a good experimental design aimed to study collective behaviour. A generic model that could describe the common underlying mechanisms of crowd behaviour among organisms of different body sizes is identified as future challenge.