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Strategies and limitations in app usage and human mobility.
Marco De Nadai1,2,3, Angelo Cardoso4, Antonio Lima4
1Vodafone Research, Paddington Central, London, W2 6BY, UK. denadai@fbk.eu.
Scientific Reports
|July 31, 2019
Summary
Cognitive limits affect digital behavior, with individuals using a stable number of mobile applications. This capacity declines with age and links to physical mobility, revealing connections between online and offline human behavior.
Area of Science:
- Computational Social Science
- Social Physics
- Human Behavior Studies
Background:
- Cognitive capacity limits stable social networks and frequented physical locations.
- The digital space's impact on these cognitive constraints is not well understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if cognitive constraints observed in physical and social spaces also apply to digital behavior, specifically mobile application usage.
- To explore the relationship between digital behavior, physical mobility, and demographic factors like age.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of pseudonymized mobility and mobile application usage data from 400,000 individuals over six months.
- Identification of individual usage patterns and categorization into 'app keepers' and 'explorers'.
Main Results:
- Individuals exhibit a conserved capacity limiting the number of regularly used mobile applications.
- This digital capacity decreases with age, mirroring trends in physical space but with distinct dynamics.
- Two distinct user profiles, 'app keepers' and 'explorers,' were identified based on usage stability.
- Mobile application capacity was found to predict physical mobility capacity, and vice versa.
Conclusions:
- Human behavior in digital and physical worlds is interconnected, influenced by cognitive constraints.
- Age significantly impacts digital capacity, with usage patterns differing between stable 'keepers' and dynamic 'explorers'.
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