Temperature and Pedestrian Tempo

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Abstract
Associations between heat and pedestrian tempo were examined in two field studies and a true experiment. The first quasi-experiment revealed that pedestrians walked faster in a warm than in a cool setting; the second disclosed that low temperatures were also associated with more rapid movement but pedestrians walked as fast inside buildings as they did outdoors when temperatures in the settings were equal. Similar results were obtained in a third experiment following random assignment to experimental conditions. However, subjects in the last experiment did not show awareness of internal states (arousal and negative affect) which presumably mediate associations between heat and performance.