Highlights  We analyze bottleneck flow of preschool children in a laboratory experiment.  The pedestrian flow of children and adult under different movement motivations are compared.  The relation between flow and bottleneck width for children and adults are unified.  Arch-like and teardrop-shape distribution are observed for the children' and adults' movement respectively. Abstract:Understanding on children's movement characteristics is significant to improve their safety levels especially under emergencies. In this work, we performed laboratory experiment to investigate the dynamics of preschool children passing through bottlenecks under high movement motivation. It is found that the relations between flow and bottleneck width for adults and children can be unified when the body size and movement motivation are considered in certain way. High movement motivation leads to competition among pedestrians, which results in different spatial-temporal distribution of the density and speed compared to normal movement of adult. Based on Voronoi method, an arch-like distribution is observed for the children movement with competition, whereas it is teardrop-shaped for the adults without competition. The peak density of children, which reaches nearly 14 ped/m 2 , appears at the place 30 cm away from the bottleneck entrance. However, it is about 100 cm to the bottleneck for adults. Besides, several typical behaviors of children like guiding, pushing as well as playing are observed in the experiment. The findings in this study will benefit the evacuation drill design as well as the facility design for children.

Highlights We analyze pedestrian route choice behavior around obstacles in a simple scenario  We compare a field study and a virtual experiment with identical setups  We find qualitatively similar results in both settings  This helps to validate virtual experiments as a useful methodology AbstractPedestrians often need to decide between different routes they can use to reach their intended destinations, both during emergencies and in their daily lives. This routechoice behavior is important in determining traffic management, evacuation efficiency and building design. Here, we use field observations and a virtual experiment to study the route choice behavior of pedestrians around obstacles delimiting exit routes and examine the influence of three factors, namely the local distance to route starting points  Corresponding author: Jun Zhang, Email: junz@ustc.edu.cn 2 and the pedestrian density and walking speeds along routes. Crucially, both field study and virtual experiment consider the same scenario which allows us to directly assess the validity of testing pedestrian behavior in virtual environments. We find that in both data sets the proportion of people who choose a closer exit route increases as the difference in distance between exit route starting points increases. Pedestrians' choices in our data also depend on pedestrian density along routes, with people preferring less used routes. Our results thus confirm previously established route choice mechanisms and we can predict over 74% of choices based on these factors. The qualitative agreement in results between the field study and the virtual experiment suggests that in simple route-choice scenarios, such as the one we investigate here, virtual experiments can be a valid experimental technique for studying pedestrian behavior. We therefore provide much-needed empirical support for the emerging paradigm of experiments in virtual environments.

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