Investigation of Potential Cognition Factors Correlated to Fire Evacuation

Abstract

The design of a navigation system to support fire evacuation depends not only on speed but also relatively thorough considerations of the cognition factors. This study has investigated the potential cognition factors, which can affect the human behaviours and decision making during fire evacuation, by taking a survey among indoor occupants in age of 20s under designed virtual scenarios. It mainly focuses on two aspects of Fire Responses Performances (FRPs), i.e. indoor familiarity (spatial cognition) and psychological stress (situated cognition). The collected results have shown that these cognition factors can be affected by gender and user height and they are correlated with each other in certain ways. It has also investigated users’ attitudes to the navigation services under risky and non-risky conditions. The collected answers are also found to be correlated with the selected FRP factors. These findings may help to further design of personalized indoor navigation support for fire evacuation.