Thirty-one patients underwent a parotidectomy with the main trunk of GAN sacrificed (group A), 29 patients had the posterior-auricular branch preserved (group B), and 33 patients had the lobular branch preserved (group C).
This means that the mechanism to manage group cohesion works well, decreasing the tendency to reach the goal to preserve group cohesion.
The limitations of this study include the absence of a control group and the small cohort of patients but this attributable to the restriction in the inclusion criteria to preserve group homogeneity.
A trade-off between the goal attraction and the intra-inter group cohesion is necessary to preserve group cohesion: in the situation in which the spatial dispersion value is low, the cohesion tendency has to be less influential than the goal attraction on the overall pedestrian behaviour.
In the following, we will discuss a metric of group dispersion that we adopted to quantify this perceived distance and then we will show how it can be used to adapt the weights of the different components of the movement utility computation to preserve group cohesion.
While the above elements are sufficient to generate a simple pedestrian model that considers the presence of groups, even structured ones, the introduced mechanisms are not sufficient to preserve group cohesion, as discussed in a previous work adopting a very similar approach (Bandini et al. 2011).
Grooming has long been known to serve a social function in primate societies, thus social grooming is one potential way for individuals to cope with competition and preserve group stability.
This difference between the preserved group and the minimally impaired group also disappeared with Bonferroni adjustment for multiple comparison.
Using Bonferroni method of adjusting for multiple comparisons, however, total mortality did not differ between the preserved group and the minimally impaired group.
