Study finds preschool children form ‘social droplets’ when moving around the classroom

If you have ever experienced a preschool environment you will know how seemingly chaotic it can be. Now physicists in the US and Germany have examined the movement of preschool children in classroom and playground settings to detemine if any rules can be gleaned from their dawdling.

To do so they put radio-frequency tags on the vests of more than 200 children aged between two and four and then monitored their position and trajectories via receivers placed around the environment.

The researchers found that the dynamics resembled two distinct phases. The first is a gas-like phase in which the children are moving freely while exploring their surroundings.

This was mostly seen in the playground where children could roam without restriction with the researchers finding that toddlers’ movement is similar to that of pedestrian flow.

The second phase is a “liquid-vapour-like state”, in which the children act like molecules to form “droplets” of social groups. In other words, they coalesce into smaller, more clustered groups with some “free-moving” individuals entering and exiting these groups.

The team found that this phase was most evident in classrooms, in which the children are more constrained and social communication plays a bigger role. Indeed, this type of behaviour has not been observed in human movement before with the findings offering new insights about the dynamics of low-speed movement.