Hart Blanton, Ph.D. - US grants

Triggered by fire/smoke alarms, chemical spill alerts, bomb threats, etc., emergency evacuations are faced daily by modern buildings. Although most of these cases turn out to be false alarms and most evacuations are orderly, some end tragically and cost greatly to those involved and to the society. Difficulties during evacuations include deciding what to do with very limited time but serious consequences, understanding the dynamic nature of threats (e.g., propagation of fire/smoke or chemical spills), and finding safe passages which are not over-crowded. Cutting across these issues is the fact that all such evacuations involve the simultaneous movement of multiple evacuees. As such, human social psychological behaviors under stress are of paramount importance, and there is a critical need to design and conduct social psychological experiments under controlled circumstances and to formulate verifiable theories. This research will use immersive virtual reality (VR) experiments - a sufficiently engaging way of embedding an individual in a building emergency - with treadmills and physiological assessments to submit to scientific test hypotheses that are otherwise impossible to test experimentally. Moreover, we will establish mathematical evacuation models taking into account the key social psychological features identified in the experiments to predict how evacuees will behave when evacuating with others. A new generation of optimization methodology will then be developed to determine how evacuees should be effectively guided to safe locations in a computationally efficient manner. Models and methods will be partially validated through simulation, VR experiments and fire drills. By bringing together a cross-disciplinary team of engineers, social and perception psychologists, and experts in security issues, the project will establish well-tested principles about social influences during evacuation to bear on creating an evacuation program that can determine what is likely to happen and how to effectively guide evacuees to safety, either exits or fire refuge areas. The project will also have the broader impact of providing a unique and fertile context for educating students, professionals and communities about safe evacuations.

Specifically, VR experiments will contain two parts in the research. In the first part, individual-participant experiments will provide rigorous tests of a number of ways in which information and social influence processes have been hypothesized to affect evacuation. In the second part, small group participant experiments will offer a moderately controlled setting for exploring the conditions under which certain phenomena will occur when groups of evacuees evacuate, phenomena that are impossible to examine by a focus on individual participants alone, and impossible to otherwise watch unfold except in uncontrolled settings such as actual disasters. Key issues to be examined include hypotheses on information-based anxiety reduction, familiarity of the environment (or habitual evacuation tendencies), herding (or pull to affiliate with others), responses to guidance, and social bond factors. Mathematical evacuation formulations will be established to capture the essence of social psychological features identified in VR experiments. A new generation of stochastic mixed-integer optimization methods will then be developed to optimize guidance in a computationally efficient manner using our latest Surrogate Lagrangian Relaxation within the decomposition and coordination framework. Egress routes for individual groups will be separately optimized, and resulting routes will be coordinated so that passages and rooms with limited capacities are properly shared to meet the total needs for joint movement. Simulation, VR experiments and fire drills will then provide partial validations of models and methods. We expect to be able to see bottlenecks appearing and dissipating, and to examine how experimental manipulations affect these and other phenomena. We also expect to be able to model and predict such phenomena, and develop optimized solutions to alleviate blocking and other detrimental behaviors for effective evacuation.

Project Summary/Abstract Most adult smokers initiate tobacco use before age 18, with considerable increases in initiation and the highest rates of use observed between the ages of 18 and 29. Although conventional cigarette use is declining somewhat, use of e-cigarettes that can promote future nicotine addiction is on the rise, particularly for youth. These statistics speak to the need to identify new methods of delivering messages designed to reduce both cigarette and e-cigarette (e-cig) use to younger Americans (i.e., adolescents and young adults). One promising approach involves delivery of graphic health warnings that communicate the risks associated with these products. The proposed research explores delivery of graphic health warnings from within virtual gaming environments. Previous research indicates that videogames can be used effectively to deliver smoking- prevention messages, but past efforts have focused on videogames designed around health-education themes (what are called ?serious? games). With surveys indicating that 97% of adolescents and 80% of young adults play videogames for entertainment, use of entertainment videogames as a tool for delivering graphic warnings has tremendous potential to influence youth cigarette and e-cig rates. However, before such an approach can be pursued, researchers need to better understand health communication dynamics in computer-mediated, virtual gaming worlds. The current project addresses this need and tests the viability of The Virtual Transportation Model of Health Communication. This model posits that, as gamers become psychologically immersed (or ?transported?) into virtual reality, their tendency to resist persuasive messages they encounter in these worlds is disrupted. The model further posits that such disruption will typically be strongest among individuals who are most likely to resist or reject ?real-world? interventions. Support for predictions comes from pilot research conducted by our research team. In this research, graphic health warnings against alcohol- impaired driving and cigarette smoking were embedded in background scenes of entertaining, interactive 3D virtual gaming worlds. Such messages were shown to reduce willingness to engage in these behaviors in the future, particularly among higher-risk individuals who reported feeling psychologically ?transported? during game play. The proposed research will build on this work by testing the viability of videogame-based interventions. In Phase 1 (Years 1 & 2) we will refine two existing videogames and develop two new ones while simultaneously empirically evaluating the best methods of delivering in-game health communications and the mechanisms by which transportation heightens in-game influence. In Phase 2 (Years 3 & 4), we will conduct randomized field trials of game-based interventions with two groups, a probability sample of adolescents (13 ? 18) and an at-risk sample of young adults (18 ? 24). In Phase 3 (Year 5) we will aggregate data across studies to create helath campaign recommendations and to launch an interactive gaming server that will permit broad distribution of empirically validated games, for use by independent health communication researchers.

Most adult smokers initiate tobacco use before age 18, with considerable increases in initiation and the highest rates of use observed between the ages of 18 and 29. Although conventional cigarette use is declining somewhat, use of e-cigarettes that can promote future nicotine addiction is on the rise, particularly for youth. These statistics speak to the need to identify new methods of delivering messages designed to reduce both cigarette and e-cigarette (e-cig) use to younger Americans (i.e., adolescents and young adults). One promising approach involves delivery of graphic health warnings that communicate the risks associated with these products. The proposed research explores delivery of graphic health warnings from within virtual gaming environments. Previous research indicates that videogames can be used effectively to deliver smoking- prevention messages, but past efforts have focused on videogames designed around health-education themes (what are called ?serious? games). With surveys indicating that 97% of adolescents and 80% of young adults play videogames for entertainment, use of entertainment videogames as a tool for delivering graphic warnings has tremendous potential to influence youth cigarette and e-cig rates. However, before such an approach can be pursued, researchers need to better understand health communication dynamics in computer-mediated, virtual gaming worlds. The current project addresses this need and tests the viability of The Virtual Transportation Model of Health Communication. This model posits that, as gamers become psychologically immersed (or ?transported?) into virtual reality, their tendency to resist persuasive messages they encounter in these worlds is disrupted. The model further posits that such disruption will typically be strongest among individuals who are most likely to resist or reject ?real-world? interventions. Support for predictions comes from pilot research conducted by our research team. In this research, graphic health warnings against alcohol- impaired driving and cigarette smoking were embedded in background scenes of entertaining, interactive 3D virtual gaming worlds. Such messages were shown to reduce willingness to engage in these behaviors in the future, particularly among higher-risk individuals who reported feeling psychologically ?transported? during game play. The proposed research will build on this work by testing the viability of videogame-based interventions. In Phase 1 (Years 1 & 2) we will refine two existing videogames and develop two new ones while simultaneously empirically evaluating the best methods of delivering in-game health communications and the mechanisms by which transportation heightens in-game influence. In Phase 2 (Years 3 & 4), we will conduct randomized field trials of game-based interventions with two groups, a probability sample of adolescents (13 ? 18) and an at-risk sample of young adults (18 ? 24). In Phase 3 (Year 5) we will aggregate data across studies to create helath campaign recommendations and to launch an interactive gaming server that will permit broad distribution of empirically validated games, for use by independent health communication researchers.